Qatar

4% of girls in Qatar marry before age 18.

1% of boys in Qatar marry before age 18.

Child marriage is driven by gender inequality and the belief that women and girls are somehow inferior to men and boys.

There is very limited information on child marriage in Qatar, but available studies show that it is exacerbated by:

Gender inequality: Qatar has strict and discriminatory laws towards women and girls, whereby they have very little agency to make their own decisions on matters pertaining to their lives.

Level of education: 21% of women who do not hold secondary education were married before the age of 18, compared to only 3% who had completed higher education.

Qatar has committed to ending child, early and forced marriage by 2030 in line with target 5.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The government submitted a 2021 Voluntary National Review at the High Level Political Forum. Recent data collected for the review indicated that for girls between the ages of 15-19 there has been a decrease in teen pregnancy, from 10.3 births per 1,000 women in 2016 to 8.5 births per 1,000 women in 2018. In the review it was raised that due to early marriage there was a low birth rate among Qatari adolescents (aged 15-19), unlike non-Qatari adolescents. For girls between the ages of 15-19, the main cause of death was pregnancy and complications with childbirth. The government has not submitted a Voluntary National Review in any High Level Political Forum since 2021.

Qatar ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1995, which the Committee on the Rights of the Child has interpreted to recommend the establishment of a minimum age of marriage of 18, and acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 2009, which obligates states to ensure free and full consent to marriage. Qatar has entered reservations to certain provisions of Article 16 CEDAW, due to their inconsistency with the provisions of Islamic law and family law.

During its 2017 review, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that the government raise the minimum age of marriage for girls to 18 and increase awareness of the harmful effects of child marriage in collaboration with the media, traditional and religious leaders and families.

In 2019, the CEDAW Committee urged the country to raise the minimum age of marriage for girls to 18 years and remove all legal exceptions.

Under Article 17 of the Family Act No. 22 of 2006, the minimum legal age of marriage is 16 years for girls and 18 years for boys. However, girls can be married off before the age of 16 with the consent of the legal guardian and the two persons to be married.

In order to get married, women and girls require a wali, (guardian's) permission to marry regardless of their age or former marital status. Once a woman is married guardianship is transferred from her father to her husband. Men are allowed to marry up to four women at any given time without any permission or consent from their other wives.