Marriage laws under scrutiny
STORY: Dave Savides
Marriage Officers will have to comply with new marriage registration procedures and deal with vastly changed documentation. The Department of Home Affairs met on Friday with a large group of local Marriage Officers - most of them church ministers - at a workshop held at the Richards Bay Civic Centre. Home Affairs spokesperson, Marcus Makama, said the workshop was necessitated by the fact that the Department had only about 3 000 Marriage Officers among its staff, while external marriage officers numbered around 92 000. However, numerous fraudulent and illegal marriages were taking place, often based on forged identity documents such as ID books, passports and divorce decrees. This, together with changes to the age of consent, same sex marriages and other legislation, led to new marriage registers and supporting documents being designed and printed. Though not yet available, the new Marriage Registers to be filled in by Marriage Officers will include fingerprints and identity photographs. Greater care will have to be taken to ensure that the couples’ personal documents are valid. ‘As an example of the fraud we deal with, about 30 percent of grant applicants names don’t exist at Home Affairs when we check birth certificates,’ said Makama. He said their legal department was investigating laws pertaining to outdoor marriages as ‘clearly there is a great demand for people wanting to get married in places other than in a church or other building’. New procedures will also improve accountability in being able to trace where Marriage Registers were ‘lost’ after being submitted. Makama warned that Marriage Registers could only be signed by the official Marriage Officer and could not be lent or borrowed.
Have your say. Write to the Editor.
