Abstract
The article refers to a recent article on child marriage in Nigeria, published in this Journal, as a broad context to examine two issues. The first is the statutory elaboration of the constitutional protection of children, and the second is the suggestion that religious marriages trump children's rights in Nigeria's constitutional jurisprudence. These issues are discussed together in the context of the belief that the absence of statutory protection of children is not fatal to their human rights protection, and that neither an Islamic nor any other religious marriage trumps the rights of children in Nigeria. The article recommends a negotiated consensus in determining the minimum age for child marriage, given Nigeria's plural and religious constituents.
Highlights
In this article I reflect on two aspects of the article on child marriage in Nigeria by Braimah.[1]
The first is the statutory elaboration of the constitutional protection of children, and the second is the suggestion that religious marriages trump children’s rights in Nigeria’s constitutional jurisprudence
2 Statutory elaboration of human rights: The Child Rights Act and the protection of children in Nigeria. In this part of my comment I address the effect of a constitutional design that expressly or impliedly relies on statutory elaboration as a means of providing content to human rights in Nigeria, where the protection of children is principally through the Child Rights Act (CRA) and Child Rights Law (CRL) promulgated in many of Nigeria’s 36 states
Summary
The article refers to a recent article on child marriage in Nigeria, published in this Journal, as a broad context to examine two issues. The first is the statutory elaboration of the constitutional protection of children, and the second is the suggestion that religious marriages trump children’s rights in Nigeria’s constitutional jurisprudence. These issues are discussed together in the context of the belief that the absence of statutory protection of children is not fatal to their human rights protection, and that neither an Islamic nor any other religious marriage trumps the rights of children in Nigeria. The article recommends a negotiated consensus in determining the minimum age for child marriage, given Nigeria’s plural and religious constituents
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