UN panel welcomes Pakistan’s marriage-age law, flags bonded labour and child brides
The Palais des Nations in Geneva, home of the United Nations Office at Geneva — file photo (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0). The committee completed its review of Pakistan's report here.
A United Nations committee has welcomed Pakistan’s law setting 18 as the minimum age of marriage, but pressed Islamabad hard on the gap between the law and life on the ground — some 19 million child brides, bonded labour in the brick kilns, and families still waiting to rebuild after the floods.
The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights wrapped up its review of Pakistan’s second periodic report in Geneva on Wednesday. The panel was examining how far the country has come under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights since its first review.
Nineteen million child brides
Committee expert Michael Windfuhr welcomed the 2025 amendment to the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, which raised the marriage age to 18 for both boys and girls. But he said the committee remained concerned about the sheer number of child brides — put at around 19 million in the session, concentrated in Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan — and asked what difference the prevention measures had actually made.
Bonded labour in the kilns
Another expert, Lazhari Bouzid, said bonded labour remained widespread in agriculture and in the informal sector, above all in brick making. He told the session that construction companies and government agencies were themselves implicated, buying bricks produced through debt bondage, and asked how Pakistan had answered those reports.
The Pakistani delegation said the Constitution bans slavery and all forms of forced labour, and pointed to the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1992. Punjab, it said, had documented more than 210,000 kiln workers, set up district vigilance committees, and its labour inspectors had identified over 2,900 victims of forced labour last year.
Six hundred thousand homes rebuilt
On the floods, the delegation said 600,000 of the 2.1 million homes destroyed in 2022 had been rebuilt, with work on the rest under way. Windfuhr had asked how the country was coping with the 2022 and 2025 floods — whether people could rebuild, get their land back, and how many were still displaced. A national flood protection programme, the delegation said, aims to shield eight million acres of farmland and 2.2 million homes.
The law still has gaps
The session also exposed uneven ground. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan the minimum marriage age is still 16, and a challenge to the 18-year rule has been pending before the Federal Shariat Court since June. The delegation was led by Barrister Aqeel Malik, the minister of state for law and justice. The committee will now issue its concluding observations, which its task-force leader, Julieta Rossi, said it hoped Pakistan would implement in good faith.
