A Saudi court has rejected a plea to divorce an eight-year-old girl married off by her father to a man who is 58, saying the case should wait until the girl reaches puberty, a lawyer involved told AFP.A mother is not even allowed to protect her own daughter from being abused, thanks to the all-wise sharia law of Saudi Arabia.
"The judge has dismissed the plea—filed by the mother—because she does not have the right to file such a case, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty," lawyer Abdullah Jtili told AFP in a telephone interview after Saturday's court decision.
The divorce plea was filed in August by the girl's divorced mother with a court at Unayzah, 220 kilometers (135 miles) north Riyadh just after the marriage contract was signed by the father and the groom.
"She doesn't know yet that she has been married," Jtili said then of the girl who was about to begin her fourth year at primary school.
Relatives who did not wish to be named told AFP that the marriage had not yet been consummated, and that the girl continued to live with her mother. They said that the father had set a verbal condition by which the marriage is not consummated for another 10 years, when the girl turns 18.
The father had agreed to marry off his daughter for an advance dowry of 30,000 riyals ($8,000), as he was apparently facing financial problems, they said.
The father was in court and he remained adamant in favor of the marriage, they added.
In Yemen in April, another girl aged eight was granted a divorce after her unemployed father forced her to marry a man of 28, who forced the child to have sex with him.
Sick, sick, sick.