Combating Child Marriages in India: Harmonise Human Rights Concerns with Cultural Considerations

Child Marriages have serious detrimental effects on the health, education, development and personality of young girls which in turn results in violation of their human rights This paper identifies human rights provisions expressed in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979 ( UN Women’s Convention) and examines India’s compliance with the Convention’s provisions to tackle child marriages in the country. The paper contests the universal vision of human rights and argues for a more realistic appraisal of the ‘cultural’ limitations of international human rights law so as to effectively tackle a complex problem like child marriages in India . The article contends that a failure to accommodate cultural considerations would considerably hurt the application of human rights law to tackle child marriages in India at the field or grassroots level. Searching for practical and feasible remedies to combat and eliminate child marriages in the country, this paper proposes a strategy that occupies the middle ground between two dichotomous poles of ‘universal human rights’ and ‘ cultural distinctiveness’