German officials confirmed that 358 child marriages were recorded in one state since 2012, but only eight were ever legally undone.
Story Snapshot
- Baden-Württemberg’s Interior Ministry reported 358 suspected child marriages dating back to 2012.
- Only eight marriages were legally annulled between 2018 and 2024.
- One case involved an 11-year-old Iraqi girl married to a 17-year-old boy.
- The remaining 350 cases closed through other means, like the child turning 18.
- The report came from an inquiry filed by the AfD party, adding political weight to the findings.
State Government Confirms Hundreds of Cases
Lawmakers in Baden-Württemberg, a state in southwestern Germany, asked the Interior Ministry how many child marriages officials had found since 2012. The answer: 358 cases, tracked by a regional government office in Tübingen. The number covers more than a decade and includes marriages involving girls from countries like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
The most extreme case on record involved an 11-year-old Iraqi girl married to a 17-year-old Iraqi boy. That marriage was annulled in 2020. Officials did not report any other cases involving a bride that young, but the case shows how far outside normal legal limits some of these marriages fell before authorities stepped in.
At the time the ministry answered the inquiry, no annulment cases were pending in court. That means every case already recorded had either been closed or was sitting without active legal action. For a state with hundreds of flagged marriages, that detail raised questions about how much follow-up happens after a case gets logged.
Why So Few Marriages Were Undone
German law treats these cases differently depending on the child’s age. A marriage involving someone under 16 is automatically invalid under German law. A marriage involving a 16- or 17-year-old stays legally valid unless a court formally annuls it. That legal split helps explain why the annulment count stayed low — many marriages may not have needed a court order to be treated as void.
Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court added another twist in 2023. Judges ruled that the 2017 law banning child marriages was partly unconstitutional because it failed to spell out what happens next for marriages declared invalid, and it gave no path for a couple to make the marriage valid again once both turned 18. Lawmakers had to rewrite the rules.
Officials in Baden-Württemberg say the 350 cases that never reached final annulment closed for other reasons. Some children turned 18. In some cases, a spouse died. Others chose not to pursue annulment, and some couples remarried outside Germany. None of those outcomes count as a court-ordered annulment, but they are not proof that officials ignored the cases either.
What the Public Record Does Not Show
The published figures do not break down each of the 350 non-annulled cases by age, country, or whether a child welfare office got involved. Without that detail, it is hard to know how many cases involved real danger to a child versus paperwork that closed on its own once someone turned 18 or left the country.
The numbers also only cover one German state. Baden-Württemberg is not the whole country, and no matching data has been published showing whether other states have similar counts. Treating this as a nationwide crisis would require comparable figures from every German region, which do not currently exist in public form.
The inquiry that produced these numbers came from the AfD, a party that has built much of its platform around tougher immigration rules. That origin does not make the 358-case figure untrue, since it came from the government’s own records, not the party’s own count. But it does mean the story arrives already wrapped in a political fight over immigration, which can make it harder to focus on the child-protection questions the numbers actually raise.
Sources:
thegatewaypundit.com, euronews.com, welt.de, bundesverfassungsgericht.de, bmjv.de
