14 DAY TRIAL // The divorce has been granted in the case of the 70-year-old man from Saudi Arabia and his much younger bride. At only 15, the girl's marriage to him was arranged by her parents.
Authorities were alerted on the situation by the husband himself, who called them in when he felt he was being played for a fool.
The girl has agreed to wed him, went through with the ceremony, then backed out of the marriage almost immediately after. On her wedding night, she hid and refused to leave the bedroom. Just a couple of days after, she returned with her family.
“I feel that there is a conspiracy by her mother against me,” he allegedly complained to local police.
As the case was publicized in local media, it raised concerns on child marriage by human rights organizations.
“Child marriage is a violation of human rights,” Activist NoonArabia, of Yemen, wrote online.
Twitter was a boiling pot, with several users expressing their disapproval of what they believe means selling off little girls.
“It's only when there's enough public outrage that we can fight #childmarriage. We are not angry enough to help that 15 y/o & others like her,” Mona Eltahawy of Egypt says, according to the Daily Mail.
As we wrote before, the elderly Saudi Arabian citizen paid $20,000 (€15,300) to the girl's family, to be allowed to marry their daughter. He argued that a court would validate their matrimony, as it is that payment that grants it the status of “legal and correct.”
The man motivated his decision for divorcing the girl by explaining that the parents had told him the girl was 25 years old, eCanadaNow notes. Even so, investigators sent by a Human Rights Commission revealed that he might be, in fact, 86 years old.