Portugal‘s parliament today (31/1) voted in first reading a bill to raise the minimum legal age to marry from 16 to 18, mainly to prevent forced marriages of young girls.

The adopted bill was tabled by Left Bloc MPs, while another text along the same lines, proposed by the right-wing Chega party, was rejected.

“Raising the age of marriage constitutes a fundamental step to suppress child marriages,” the Bloc pointed out in its proposed law, recalling that underage marriage “is the result of pressure from the family.”

Currently, Portuguese law allows for the marriage of minors aged between 16 and 18 with the permission of their parents or legal guardians.

Almost 860 marriages, where one of the spouses was under 18 years old, were performed in Portugal between 2015 and 2022, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics, cited in a report published at the end of 2024 by the Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality.

Unicef, which is concerned about the continued rise of this practice in Portugal from 2020, recently called for a ban on marriages between persons under 18.