5 Punishment of Marriage-Related Offences and the Conflicting Issues

1. Child marriage: an offence under the Criminal Code 2074 — both the marrying parties above the age of discretion and the arrangers/abettors (parents, guardians, priests) punishable; the 20-year age bar; the Supreme Court's zero-tolerance line in Santosh Kumar Yadav (2080(1) D.N. 11015 — the child-marriage-and-statutory-rape overlap; Criminal Law-II, this semester, Unit 4's full treatment); 2. Polygamy/bigamy: the criminal bar (marrying another while a spouse lives — punishment plus the second marriage's voidness); the Idris Miya annotation's context (Criminal Law-II, Unit 4); the "unheard-of-spouse seven years" exception's classical debate; 3. Incest marriage: the prohibited-degrees marriage — void plus criminal (the Criminal Code's incest offences — Criminal Law-II, Unit 2); 4. Jari: the old Ain's adultery-custom (the "jari" man's fine-and-liability system) — historically a property-and-husband-centered regime; abolished with the modern codes; its afterlife in social practice and in the dowry-and-honour discourse; the modern law's replacement: the Domestic Violence Act 2066's protections, the civil-alignment of adultery — until the Supreme Court's adultery ruling (2021) decriminalizing adultery as unconstitutional (the gendered-application critique vindicated); 5. Living together: cohabitation without marriage — no status created as such (no common-law marriage in Nepal); the consequences that DO attach: children's legitimacy (the Code protects children born of void-and-unregistered unions in defined ways), maintenance claims in defined patterns, and the property-dispute practice (the courts treating long cohabitation as…