КРИМИНАЛИЗАЦИЈА ПРИНУДНОГ ЗАКЉУЧЕЊА БРАКА – ИСКУСТВА ПОЈЕДИНИХ ЕВРОПСКИХ ЗЕМАЉА
CRIMINALIZATION OF FORCED MARRIAGE: EXPERIENCES OF SOME EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

Summary/Abstract: Forced marriage is a matrimonial relationship concluded under duress or coersion, without free consent and against the will of one or both contracting parties. It is a very complex social phenomenon which can be associated with certain customary, religious and traditional practices (such as: arranged marriages and early marriages of children), as well as with other forms of social pathology (such as: honor killings, domestic violence or trafficking in human beings). Today, the use of coercion in concluding marriages is commonly regarded as a violation of human rights, particularly the individual freedom of choice and the right to freely enter into marriage, which are guaranteed in many international documents, starting from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. It should be emphasized that certain international documents, such as the Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention) and the EU Directive 2011/36 on the Prevention and Suppression of Trafficking in Persons and the Protection of Victims, explicitly require the state parties to criminalize such conduct. In this regard, the subject matter of research in this paper covers the following questions: first, how different countries met the undertaken obligations: whether they envisaged separate, independent legal provisions incriminating such conduct, whether they amended or modified the existing ones, or whether they introduced no changes at all given that such behaviour can be subsumed under some of the already envisaged criminal offences; second, how they defined the newly introduced or redefined criminal offences; and third, what kind of experiences they had in the application of the envisaged provisions.

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