Saudi mother asks for divorce for daughter (8)
Riyadh – A Saudi court will next month hear a plea for divorce from an 8-year-old girl married off by her father to a man in his 50s, the Arabic-language daily Al-Watan said this week.
It said the girl’s mother had filed the divorce case with the court at Unayzah, 220km north of Riyadh, and cited lawyer Abdullah Jtili as saying the father had arranged the marriage without telling the girl.
[…]Al-Watan said relatives of the girl had told a Saudi rights group of her plight and urged it to intervene to have the marriage annulled.
But the daily also reported that the husband had refused to renounce the marriage, saying that he had not done anything illegal.
Arranged marriages involving pre-adolescents are occasionally reported in the Arabian Peninsula, including in the ultra-conservative Saudi kingdom where the strict conservative Wahabi version of Sunni Islam holds sway and polygamy is common.