By Saman Indrajith

Making use of personal laws prevailing in a country at present to attack a single community would not be approved by any civilized nation, Justice Minister Ali Sabry told Parliament yesterday.

“It is so unfortunate that practices of those laws have become a tagline or a slogan for campaigns intended to raise hatred and disharmony among communities,” the Minister said.

Responding to a series of questions raised by Our Power of People’s Party National List MP Ven Aturaliye Ratana Thera, Minister Sabry said that personal laws in the country had evolved over centuries. The One Law One Country concept of the government was being implemented in spirit and in letter to promote the Sri Lankan national identity, the Minister said.

“There are several personal laws in this country. Among them are the Kandyan Marriage and Divorce Act, the Jaffna Thesawalamai Law, the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act, the Buddhist Temporalities Act and the Church of Ceylon Act. The Muslim law has been recognised as a personal law in many other countries, including India, the Philippines, Israel and Singapore. The Muslim laws are not solely made on the basis of the Quran. It was first recognised as the Mohammadan Code among other personal laws such as the Kandyan Law and the Theswalamai law in 1806. Thereafter, these laws evolved with time. For example, until 1938 amendments to the Kandyan law polyandry and polygamy were accepted in law. It is asked whether the Muslim law permits the marrying off of underage Muslim girls without their consent. This is not true. Such marriages are registered with their consent and only their fathers place their signature on registration documents on their behalf too after ascertaining the consent of the girl. In some states in the US the minimum age for marriage is 13, while in some provinces in Japan it is 15. Until 1997, here in Sri Lanka, that age was 16 years. According to Sections 8 to 15 of the Kandyan Law and the Section 22 of the Marriage Ordinance an underage marriage is accepted if the marrying children have the consent of their parents. There had been many such mismatches in the law until the Court intervened in 2002 and gave an order that the minimum age for marriage should be 18 years. Even in Saudi Arabia the minimum age of marriage is 18 now. We too have accepted that the minimum age of marriage should be set 18. I submitted a Cabinet paper in Nov 2020 to that effect. There I have also proposed the amending of the laws enabling females to act as Quazi judges and that the females getting married should place their signature in the registration documents. In addition, I have set up an advisory committee to amend Muslim laws and when their recommendations are ready they will be announced to the community so that people too could submit their proposals. We will consider all of them in amending the laws. I am against the marriages under the age of 18. There is also another fact that around 80 percent of underage mothers are not reported from the Muslim community but from other communities. That means they have become mothers even if their marriages are not registered.”

Minister Sabry said that achieving one law one country could not be achieved by doing away with personal laws of Muslim community only; there was the possibility of abolishing all personal laws at once and that could be done through the new Constitution being drafted, he added.