Both the Committee on the Rights of the Child of the United Nations and the Council of Europe, as well as other specialized NGOs, have been asking Spain to raise the marrying age, the lowest in the European Union.
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Spanish law until now had allowed 14-year-olds to marry with permission from a judge.
The minimum age for sexual relations was also raised on Thursday, from 13 to 16, after global bodies including the United Nations and the European Council pressed for a change. Only five of those marriages occurred in 2014. In the ’80s, some 12,867 marriages took place involving at least one person under 16.
Nevertheless, the UN experts and child protection groups that lobbied for Spain to increase the marriage limit for the past several years were thrilled with the success.
While almost 2,000 children married each year in the seventies (mostly girls), since 2000 there have been a total of 360, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics collected by Europa Press.
Spain now has the same age of consent as France, Britain, and the Netherlands, and higher than Germany and Italy, where it is 14.
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Ten years earlier, men married at an average age of 30.7 years, and women at 28.7 years.
