A small but maybe evolving to a large stir in the polder of Dutch legal culture and its relation to ethnic and religious minorities: The organization ‘Femmes for Freedom’ aired in a national newspaper that the Amsterdam police and the organization Fier Fryslan helped to arrange an Islamic religious marriage between a young Pakistani girl and boy. The case, as far as can be reconstructed from the newspaper article, was that the girl was promised to marry a cousin in Pakistan, but she fell in love with a local guy. This resulted in a clash with her parents, with (threats of?) violence toward the girl who was subsequently (with help of police) brought to a women’s shelter.
Negotiations then began, of which the result was that the parents agreed to a religious marriage with the local guy, so that they had a ‘valid argument’ for the cousin in Pakistan. During a workshop organized by the Ministry of Social Affairs on ‘Honour and Freedom’ the police and Fier Fryslan presented the case as a ‘success story’.
The newspaper cites one person, lawyer Ellie van den Brom who is experienced with ethnic minorities family legal issues, who agrees with the pragmatic solution for the dilemma of ‘either break with your family and get a new identity’ versus ‘negotiate for a pragmatic solution’. Others were ‘flabbergasted’ and ‘fell off their chair when they heard about it’. Their reactions are telling for the polarized discourse in this: ‘a woman in a religious marriage hardly has any rights’, there is a ‘danger of being locked up in the marriage because if a man does not agree with a divorce then you will never get rid of him’, and ‘a religious marriage leaves a woman without any rights’. The girl moreover – the tendency in the article is – probably did not know what she did.
Apart from this, the accusation was that the police broke the law because they aided in the religious marriage. In Dutch law however, only a person with a certain religious status who concludes the marriage, acts illegally (art 449 of the Criminal Law says “de bedienaar van de godsdienst” i.e. the servant of a religion).
And without being too cynical: Let us not forget the possibility that the girl will be killed anyway, married or not.
