This folder contains the legislation used to code the WORLD Child Marriage Laws 2023 dataset. Unless otherwise indicated, all legislation is to the best of our knowledge current as of May 31, 2023. Legislation is provided in its original language, unless an official translation in English was available. In some instances, including in countries with multiple official languages, different pieces of legislation may be in different languages for the same country.

In a small number of countries, we could not retrieve the original version of legislation that we had used to code those countries’ variables. In those cases, we have included the same piece of legislation, but updated after May 31, 2023. In all of these cases we reviewed all amendments to the law to ensure that no amendments that would be relevant to the dataset had been passed since 2023.

Countries where legislation was particularly complex, or where a country’s variables are not immediately apparent from the legislative text, have separate Readme files that explain our coding decisions. There are four broad categories of countries in this category:
-	Countries that have a law that we know exists but have been unable to retrieve
-	Countries where some values are indeterminate or the minimum age is coded as ‘unknown’
-	Countries that have no minimum age of marriage legislation
-	Countries, such as the United States, where the age of marriage is determined by subnational legislation.

For countries where we have used secondary sources, we provide citations to the material that has informed our coding. We rely particularly on reports submitted by countries themselves explaining their legislative framework to the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies, such as the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) or the Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Countries who ratify these treaties are required to report periodically to a committee of experts, and work in concert with committee members to recognize progress and identify areas where gaps remain. All country reports, including those we have not used, can be downloaded from here: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/TreatyBodyExternal/Countries.aspx 
