Sweden’s parliament approved a measure last week to ban cousin marriage as Stockholm seeks to combat the ills that multiculturalism has wrought on the country.
The Riksdag parliament has voted unanimously in favour of the government’s proposal to ban cousin marriage. The legislation, which is set to come into force from the start of July, will also outlaw marriages between a person and close blood relatives such as nieces and nephews.
Additionally, the new law will also mean that marriages between cousins conducted abroad will no longer be recognised as valid within Sweden.
Lawmakers said that the purpose of the legislation will be to “counteract honour-based oppression, violence and other pressure connected with entering into marriage.”
While cousin marriage was largely expunged throughout Europe in the Middle Ages after being prohibited by the Catholic Church, previously homogenous countries such as Sweden have seen a rise in such practices with the mass importation of migrants from cultures in which consanguinity is commonplace.
The government has noted that cousin marriage comes with a “particular risk” of honour violence and deprivation of freedom for girls and women.
“Customs associated with cousin marriage also risk contributing to social isolation and to maintaining structures of honour and kin-based criminal networks,” a government report stated.
Indeed, in what is often cited as one of the first confirmed instances of its kind in the country, Kurdish migrant Fadime Şahindal, who moved to Sweden at the age of seven from Turkey, was murdered by her father in 2002 at the age of 26 after she stated that she wished to live as a free woman with her Swedish boyfriend and thus refused to marry her cousin.
The issue is widespread among minority communities in Sweden, with a 2017 report finding that nearly a quarter million young people with a migrant background were forced to live under the oppression of honour-related rules, including forced marriages.
Cousin marriage has also been linked to specific migrant groups in other European countries, with estimates from the Oxford-based Pharos Foundation research institute finding, for example, that between 40 and 60 per cent of all marriages in the Pakistani community in Britain are between close relatives.
Pharos Foundation director Patrick Nash previously stated that familial inbreeding has been tied to negative outcomes for offspring, including “increased susceptibility to various cancers and infectious pathogens such as hepatitis; greater frequencies of birth defects including facial clefts and cardiovascular conditions; increased risks of various psychoses such as mood disorders, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s; higher infant mortality rates; and depressed I.Q. scores on an individual and national level.”
The pushback against the practice in Sweden comes amid a broader movement by the centre-right government against the open borders ethos that dominated the country under the previous Social Democrat party. Earlier this year, the government announced that it would strengthen citizenship requirements, including increasing the number of years spent in the country, raising the annual income threshold, and requiring that migrants become fluent in Swedish.
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