Public Defender with the Legal Aid Commission lawyer Ernestina Obboh Botchwey, known widely as Lawyer Tina, has explained that civil marriages ( court marriages) that people enter into in foreign countries primarily to obtain residency permits or citizenship, commonly called “paper marriages”, are proper, legal marriages and cannot be set aside without following the legal processes laid down on how to end such marriages.
She warned that such marriages continue to exist even if the parties enter into other marriages without properly ending their “paper” marriages.
Using the legal case of Ernestina Beateng and Phyllis Serwah and Others, in which the Supreme Court of Ghana in 2021 ruled that court marriages remain legally in force if they are not properly dissolved, she warned that such marriages are not automatically ended because the parties have abandoned them and married other partners.
In a video posted on her YouTube Channel, Ghana Law and More, she stressed that the law considers so called paper marriages as legal marriages since they are legally contracted.
“You can say you merely married for papers and it not a proper legal marriage. No. If you have a civil marriage just for papers, you can’t argue in Court that it wasn’t a legal marriage. You must dissolve that marriage before you marry again,” she explained in Twi.
Paper marriages are rampant in countries such as the UK, USA, Canada, Germany and other countries where marriage to a citizen is a pathway to obtaining citizenship.
But lawyer Tina wants people to know that such marriages can have dire repercussions in the future if the right things are not done and the parties contract other marriages.
