Maputo Article 6: Marriage

What it does

Article 6 converts the general equality principle from Article 2 into specific, enforceable marital rights: ten distinct provisions covering consent, minimum age, property, nationality, and naming rights within marriage. It's the article most states have chosen to resist, and understanding why requires seeing exactly what it demands.

What it states

States must legislate to guarantee that:

(a) No marriage occurs without the free and full consent of both parties

(b) The minimum age of marriage for women is 18

(c) Monogamy is encouraged as the preferred form, while the rights of women within polygamous marriages are still promoted and protected

(d) Every marriage is recorded in writing and registered under national law to be legally recognized

(e) Matrimonial regime and place of residence are chosen by mutual agreement

(f) A married woman may retain her maiden name and use it as she chooses

(g) A woman may retain her own nationality or acquire her husband's

(h) Women and men have equal rights regarding their children's nationality, subject to national security exceptions

(i) Both spouses jointly safeguard the family's interests and their children's upbringing

(j) A woman may acquire, administer, and manage her own property freely during marriage

Use as a vehicle for new protections

Two provisions stand out as going meaningfully further than CEDAW's own marriage article (Art. 16). First, Article 6(b) sets an explicit, numeric minimum age, 18, where CEDAW's equivalent language is vaguer, referring only to a marriage requiring "free and full consent" without fixing an age floor in the text itself. Second, Article 6(d)'s registration requirement is a quietly significant enforcement mechanism: unregistered marriages are notoriously difficult to unwind or protect within, especially for women seeking property division or child custody later, so mandatory registration is really a downstream protection for Articles 7 (divorce) and 21 (inheritance) as much as it's about Article 6 itself.

Reservations

Algeria has entered a reservation permitting exceptions to the minimum marriage age in 6(b). Ethiopia and South Africa have reservations allowing unregistered marriages to stand, undermining 6(d)'s core registration requirement. For South Africa, this connects to how customary marriages are recognized domestically. Tunisia, Sudan, Kenya, and Namibia have also recorded reservations touching the marriage provisions, largely where the article's mutual-consent and registration requirements collide with existing customary or religious marriage law still operating in parallel with civil law. Article 6, unlike Article 5, is a place where states are willing to preserve a domestic exception rather than fully commit.