Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill [HL]

Oddly enough, I know a bit about this because I introduced another Private Member’s Bill, which someone else took over, which concerned the problem of Jewish religious marriages where, owing to an extremely narrow interpretation of the Book of Deuteronomy in the 12th century where Moses Maimonides adopted a liberal view but subsequently, unfortunately, Jewish sages adopted a narrower view, there was the problem of the chained wives. The problem was that if a Jewish man wanted to marry another woman and had had a religious marriage, he could have a civil divorce but not a religious divorce. Under Jewish traditional law, as under Muslim family law, the woman would remain married to him. If she remarries her children would be stigmatised as illegitimate and so on. The noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Hendon, was a particular supporter of that Bill. It was pointed out that my Bill dealt only with Jewish marriages; it was discriminatory and needed to deal with, for example, Muslim marriages. A power is included in the Bill to allow the provision to be extended to Muslim marriages and to give power to the family judge to refuse to give a civil divorce to a man in such a position until he is given the religious divorce. I very much hope that that point will be taken up. It has not been yet. So the answer is that there is not much that a civil judge can do at the moment about the religious wedding and divorce in that context, but there is a power for the Lord Chancellor to extend the law. That is amazingly learned and boring, but I thought I should just mention it to answer the question.