A/HRC/31/18/Add.2 77. Interreligious marriages, although slowly becoming more popular in urban areas, have been very rare in Bangladesh. The striking paucity of interreligious marriages in a country in which people of different religious orientations have always lived side by side is a surprising phenomenon. There are good reasons to assume that difficulties arising from the existing structure of personal status laws are a main factor explaining that situation. While some interreligious constellations can be accommodated within the existing system, in accordance with the rules of the concerned religious communities, others cannot. 78. For instance, a Muslim woman cannot legally marry a non-Muslim man. In such cases, the only resort — apart from conversion or emigration — is by applying the Special Marriage Act of 1872. However, in order to have their marriage validated under the Special Marriage Act, the marrying couple must declare officially that they do not believe in any institutionalized religion. As a consequence of marrying under the terms of the Act, any member of an undivided family that professes the Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or Jaina religion shall be deemed to effect his or her severance from such family (art. 22); and no person professing the Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or Jaina religion who marries under the terms of the Act shall have any right of adoption (art. 25). 79. This unusual stipulation constitutes a factually insurmountable hurdle for many people. Either they understand themselves as believers rather than non-believers, or they would in any case prefer not to publicly proclaim non-belief for fear of societal ostracism or other inimical reactions. As long as the stipulation of declaring non-belief exists as a precondition to resorting to the Special Marriage Act, then the Act does not provide in reality the option of a civil marriage open to everyone who would like to make use of it, for instance, in order to overcome obstacles for certain interreligious marriage constellations within the current system of personal status laws. 80. The Special Rapporteur would like to emphasize that religious family laws conceptually differ from religious family values, rites or customs. Law, in whatever sphere of life, always carries with it the element of enforcement by the State. While religious rituals, customs, ceremonies and values in the broad area of marriage and family life receive general protection under the right to freedom of religion or belief, State-enforced laws based on religion can lead to problematic situations, for instance, when an interreligious marriage cannot be contracted for religious reasons or when such a marriage breaks down and the spouse who had converted to the religion of her or his partner wishes to return to the previous religion. 81. Such a return is difficult in itself and can be made even more complicated by legal insecurity, which a change of religion may incur concerning sensitive issues such as inheritance, maintenance or custody of children. Moreover, apart from raising issues under freedom of religion or belief, traditional personal status laws typically also reflect inequalities between men and women who are understood as having different roles, and concomitantly different rights, in the areas of marriage, child rearing, custody, maintenance, inheritance, etc. 82. Reportedly, demands for replacing the current system of religious laws in the sphere of personal status with a unified family law have so far been unsuccessful. Unlike in the 1980s and 1990s, when such demands were more frequently articulated, they appear to have lost much of their momentum in the current societal climate, in which religious issues are perceived as being very delicate. However, the Special Rapporteur heard passionate statements from some Hindu women who felt heavily discriminated against under the current regime of Hindu personal status laws, especially in situations of divorce or widowhood. Those women, who all were practising Hindus, expressed a clear desire that the current system of State-enforced religious personal status laws be replaced with secular family laws applicable to all without any distinctions on grounds of religion or gender. This issue seems to be contested internally within the various religious minorities. 16