Official finding Islamic institutions and contexts Other Islamic authority or family context Egypt · 2021

Egypt: the UN women's rights committee calls for penalties on ma'zoun — the religious marriage registrars — naming them as perpetrators for contracting child and forced marriages

Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

ma'zoun — the religious officials authorised to contract and register marriages in Egypt, whom the Committee names as perpetrators

Organization

United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Arab Republic of Egypt

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

The ma'zoun holds a religious office: he is the official authorised to contract and solemnise a marriage under Islamic personal-status law in Egypt, and a marriage he contracts is thereby valid. The Committee identifies him not as a bystander but as a perpetrator, because it is his exercise of that religious authority to solemnise that converts a child marriage from an intention into an accomplished fact, and his failure to report it that conceals it.

Religious marriage or family control
Institutional obedience or isolation

Scope decision

This record does NOT rely on CODEBOOK §11 and is not coded fusedAuthority. It does not need to: a ma'zoun is a religious officeholder in his own right, so the ordinary criterion is satisfied without recourse to the fused-authority clause. This is an official finding by a United Nations treaty body, not a criminal proceeding: nobody was prosecuted, no court has adjudicated anything recorded here, and no individual ma'zoun is named or accused. The Committee's language is a recommendation that penalties be imposed on ma'zoun as perpetrators — that is, it identifies the category of officeholder as bearing responsibility, not any particular person, and this record must not be read as a finding against any individual. The record does not assert how many such marriages were contracted, because the Committee gives no figure. The female genital mutilation and honour-crime provisions are recorded because the Committee raises them in the same recommendations and they bear on the same statutory framework, but they are not attributed to ma'zoun and no such link is asserted. Nothing here is a finding about Islam or about Muslims: it concerns the conduct of a specific category of state-authorised officeholder, as assessed by the treaty body Egypt reports to. The observations describe Egypt as at 2021.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2021-01-01 · concluding observations adopted

United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (treaty body established under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women). In its concluding observations on the combined eighth to tenth periodic reports of Egypt the Committee recommended that the State party 'ensure the effective implementation of Act No. 126 of 2008 on the minimum age of marriage for women and men, particularly in cases of child and forced marriage, and impose penalties on ma'zoun as perpetrators for contracting such marriages or failing to report them'. The ma'zoun is the religious official authorised under Egyptian law to contract and register a marriage. In the same set of recommendations the Committee called for the repeal of Penal Code provisions that condone violence against women by exempting perpetrators from punishment or reducing their sentences, including in so-called honour crimes, and of article 61, which it identified as exempting from punishment medical personnel who perform female genital mutilation under the guise of cosmetic surgery or of protecting a third party from grievous harm.

Documented coercion mechanisms

the contracting of marriages of girls below the statutory minimum age by the official empowered to solemnise them
failure by those officials to report such marriages
the resulting non-implementation of the statutory minimum age of eighteen

Cited record

Sources

un treaty body concluding observations United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Concluding observations on the combined eighth to tenth periodic reports of Egypt, CEDAW/C/EGY/CO/8-10 (2021).: The Committee's own concluding observations, retrieved as PDF from the United Nations documents system and read in full. Recommendation 24(d) reads that the State party should 'Ensure the effective implementation of Act No. 126 of 2008 on the minimum age of marriage for women and men, particularly in cases of child and forced marriage, and impose penalties on ma'zoun as perpetrators for contracting such marriages or failing to report them'. Recommendation 24(a) calls for repeal of Penal Code articles 17, 60, 237, 274 and 277, 'which condone acts of violence against women, such as domestic violence and so-called "honour crimes", by exempting perpetrators from punishment or reducing the sentences imposed', and of article 61, 'which exempts from punishment medical doctors and personnel who commit female genital mutilation under the guise of performing cosmetic surgery or the necessity of protecting a third party from grievous harm'.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=CEDAW%2FC%2FEGY%2FCO%2F8-10&l=en&t=pdf Corpus classification: un-treaty-body; evidentiary role: concluding-observations.
Retrieval: 2026-07-28 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-28 (CEDAW channel opened; UN document retrieved directly from documents.un.org, PDF magic bytes verified, converted with pdftotext and recommendation 24(a) and 24(d) checked verbatim before drafting)

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