A quiet reform is taking shape at the Ministry of Law. It could keep a generation of young Nepalis out of prison. Drafted badly, it could become the loophole that hides real predators. Here is where it came from, what it says, and where the harder questions are.
In Saptari, sometime in 2015, a boy of seventeen and a girl of fifteen fell in love. They were from different castes, and their families opposed the relationship. In February 2016, they eloped and married at the Siraha District Court. The girl's mother filed a First Information Report at Udayapur alleging kidnapping, hostage-taking, and rape. Under Nepal's National Penal Code, 2074, that was not a legally difficult call: any sexual intercourse with a girl below eighteen is rape, regardless of consent. The Udayapur District Court acquitted the boy after the girl herself testified in open court that the relationship had been consensual. The Biratnagar High Court reversed that acquittal in 2018 and sentenced him to eleven years.
Six years later, in November 2022, the Supreme Court of Nepal in Santosh Kumar Yadav v. Government of Nepal reduced that sentence to six months in jail and a fine of ten thousand rupees. The Court did not hold that the girl's consent was a defence. It reframed the offence: where a boy marries a girl below the age of majority and the two live as husband and wife, the offence is child marriage, not rape.
On 27 March 2026, Sobita Gautam of the Rastriya Swatantra Party became Nepal's Minister of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. Among her earliest ministerial decisions was the formation of an eight-member task force under Law Secretary Parashwar Dhungana, drawn from the Supreme Court, the Office of the Attorney General, Nepal Police, the Nepal Bar Association, and senior advocates including Meera Dhungana and associate professor Laxmi Bakhadyo. Its remit was to study legal obstacles in rape and sexual violence cases and to suggest reforms. On 18 May 2026, the Kathmandu Post reported the task force's central recommendation: a "Romeo and Juliet" provision in the National Criminal Code, borrowing a three-year age-gap rule from Australian state law.
This is what that means, and what it does not mean.
Where the name comes from
The phrase is borrowed from Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet, first performed in London around 1597, Juliet is thirteen and Romeo is in his mid-teens. Their families' feud, not their love, destroys them. The play has become the durable image of what happens when adults refuse to recognise young relationships and try instead to control them.
The legal borrowing is more recent. In the 1990s and 2000s, American state legislatures began writing "close-in-age" exceptions into their statutory rape laws. Journalists began calling them "Romeo and Juliet" clauses and the name stuck. Canada codified a federal version. Australia's states followed. The Philippines' Republic Act 11648, passed in 2022, brought the concept formally into Asian law. Nepal and India, in 2026, are the newest entrants to the debate, and both countries' apex courts have signalled they want their parliaments to act.
What the law actually is
It is a narrow statutory exception. It does not change the age of consent. It carves out a defence, in cases where both parties are close in age and the relationship is consensual and non-exploitative, that stops the older partner from being prosecuted as a rapist under the general rule.
The moral premise is uncontroversial when stated plainly. There is a real difference between a thirty-five-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old girl, and between a seventeen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl. A rape law that treats both identically is not doing justice. It is doing arithmetic.
Three things a Romeo and Juliet law does not do, and which every serious version explicitly rules out:
It does not lower the age of consent. Whatever the age was, it stays. It does not legalise adult and minor relationships. A twenty-eight-year-old with a sixteen-year-old is still rape. It does not amnesty existing rapists. Coercion, deception, and abuse of authority remain outside the exemption.
Everything else is a design question, and design questions are where the whole debate lives: how narrow the age gap should be, who bears the burden of proving consent, and what happens when one partner has just crossed eighteen and the other has not.
The current law: Section 219
Nepal's National Penal Code, 2074, deals with sexual offences in Chapter 18. Section 219 is the one that governs almost every case we are talking about. It provides that sexual intercourse with a girl below eighteen is rape, regardless of consent. The consent of a minor has no legal weight under Section 20 read with Section 219.
The punishment is graduated by the girl's age. If she was below ten, the sentence is sixteen to twenty years. Between ten and fourteen, fourteen to sixteen years. Between fourteen and sixteen, twelve to fourteen years. Between sixteen and eighteen, ten to twelve years. Rape of an adult without consent carries seven to ten years.
Read that carefully. Under Nepali law as it stands, a seventeen-year-old boy sleeping with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend faces the same statutory range as a stranger who assaults a woman on a footpath. In fact, he faces a slightly higher one.
Two contextual thresholds are worth remembering. Marriage age in Nepal is twenty for both sexes, higher than in most countries. The age of consent was raised from sixteen to eighteen when the new Code came into force in 2017. Both changes were protective in intent, drafted in response to a real history of child marriage and sexual violence. But the 2017 change also produced a category of prisoner that had not really existed before: teenagers, mostly boys, charged with statutory rape for consensual relationships. The forensic-medicine researcher Alok Atreya and his colleagues, in a 2024 paper for the Journal of Nepal Health Research Council, called this the "unintended consequences" of the reform.
The Yadav judgment: what it actually held
The Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Santosh Kumar Yadav v. Government of Nepal is the case the task force has kept citing, and it is worth understanding precisely because it is widely misread.
The Court did not hold that consent was a defence to statutory rape. What it held was more surgical and more limited. It reframed the offence: where a boy marries a girl below the age of majority and the two live as husband and wife, the offence is child marriage, not rape. The precedent is therefore narrow. It applies only where the couple have married. An unmarried teenage couple in the same circumstances is still fully exposed to Section 219.
The judgment has its critics. An Al Jazeera opinion piece published on 29 August 2023 argued that the reasoning "dramatically dilutes the concept of statutory rape" and could, perversely, incentivise child marriage as an escape from prosecution. That is a serious argument, and any honest presentation of the case has to engage with it rather than wave it away.
Yadav did not appear in a doctrinal vacuum. A body of Nepali case law running before and after it has been trying, unevenly, to work out how the Court should treat consensual adolescent relationships, marital rape within child marriage, and the rights of survivors after annulment: Krishna BK v. Government of Nepal (2017), Sarita Adhikari v. Rajaram Adhikari (2020), Abhimanyu Ahir Yadav v. Government of Nepal (2021), and Government of Nepal v. Balaju 100 (2023). The Balaju 100 verdict in particular declined to characterise a case of consensual underage sexual relations as rape, taking into account emotional ties and parenthood. Read together, this line of cases suggests the Supreme Court has been improvising a doctrinal fix, one case at a time, for what it recognises as an over-broad statute. The task force is trying to bring parliament back into that work.
The Kapilvastu cases
The reform's political momentum has come not just from a landmark verdict but from a steady drumbeat of ordinary cases across the country.
Noor Mohammed, a lawyer based in Kapilvastu who spoke to the Kathmandu Post, said he had been in court on 1 July 2026 alone for two such cases. In both, teenage couples had eloped willingly. In both, the girls' families filed rape complaints against the boys. Neither case is unusual. Both are the kind that never make it to a High Court and never make national news.
The social geometry of these prosecutions is worth stating openly. The complainant is almost never the girl. It is almost always a parent, most often a parent who disapproves because of caste, class, or the family the boy comes from. Reporting by Global Press Journal and independent studies have documented that Dalit men, in particular, face the sharpest edge of Section 219 when they marry or date women from other castes. The rape law becomes, in effect, a weapon of family disapproval, and the boy who is poor, or Dalit, or Madhesi, or simply lower in the social hierarchy of the girl's family is the one who pays.
This is what Law Secretary Dhungana meant when he said the reform "could no longer wait."
The juvenile justice crisis
The reform's other backdrop is the state of Nepal's juvenile correction system.
According to reporting by the Kathmandu Post, Nepal has eight juvenile correction centres, in Bhaktapur, Morang, Kaski, Makawanpur, Parsa, Rupandehi, Banke, and Doti, administered by the Department of Prison Management, some through non-governmental partners such as UCEP. In August and September 2023 alone, three deaths were reported across these centres. Kamal Basnet, an eighteen-year-old convicted of rape and held at the Sano Thimi centre in Bhaktapur since June 2020, died on 20 August 2023 after being denied timely medical treatment. A second death was reported in Sankhuwasabha. Sulabh KC of Rupandehi died after a clash between rival groups inside the Banke centre.
Basnet's death triggered an inmate protest the next day. In the ensuing clash, 20 police officers and 15 juvenile inmates were injured, and 221 minors escaped the centre. INSEC's later investigation concluded that the centre had been negligent. When Basnet asked for medicine for his fever, he was given only a paracetamol substitute the inmates called Niko, and he was taken to hospital only after he lost consciousness. INSEC's report also recommended that no one above the age of eighteen should be held in a child correction centre.
There is a fact here worth stating carefully. The public record does not tell us what kind of rape case Basnet had been convicted for. We do not know whether it was a Section 219 statutory case following a consensual relationship, or a violent offence. It would be dishonest to use his death as a symbol of the Romeo and Juliet debate specifically. It is honest to use it as evidence of what happens when the juvenile justice system is overcrowded, under-resourced, and holding teenagers alongside those who have crossed into adulthood inside its walls.
How other countries handle this
Nepal is not being asked to invent this from scratch.
Canada's age of consent is sixteen, with a close-in-age allowance of up to five years for the fourteen-to-fifteen bracket. The Philippines, under its 2022 reform, has an age of consent of sixteen with a three-year exemption below it, and no exemption at all for those under thirteen. In the United States, the picture is state-by-state. Florida allows a person aged sixteen or seventeen to consent to a partner up to twenty-three years old, Texas requires the gap to be three years or less, and California relies on prosecutorial discretion with no formal clause at all. Australia's states differ, but the general model is a two- to three-year close-in-age defence, and the three-year figure is what the Nepali task force is reported to be borrowing. The United Kingdom has no formal clause and uses Crown Prosecution Service discretion instead.
The clear lesson from the comparative record is that a Romeo and Juliet law is not radical. It is the international default in common-law jurisdictions. What varies is the width of the gap and the age floor below which no exemption applies.
The Indian parallel
India is having the same conversation about its Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, which mirrors Nepal's Section 219 in almost every respect. Indian High Courts have been pushing the Union Government to act for years. On 9 January 2026, the Supreme Court of India in State of Uttar Pradesh v. Anurudh [2026 SCC OnLine SC 40] formally asked the government to introduce a Romeo and Juliet clause into POCSO, noting that the Act was being "misused, misapplied and used as a tool for exacting revenge," most sharply in inter-caste and inter-religious relationships.
Estimates in Indian legal commentary suggest that a substantial share of all POCSO cases are, in substance, elopement cases, though precise figures are contested. If Nepal legislates first, it will be doing something no other South Asian country has managed. That is not a trivial thing.
The hard question: what about the boy who has just turned eighteen?
Here I have to be honest about something the reporting has not yet clarified. The task force has submitted recommendations. It has not submitted a bill. The exact contours of the exemption are undecided, and anyone who tells you they know precisely what the clause will look like, a lawyer included, is guessing.
The hardest drafting question is this: what happens when the boy has just turned eighteen but the girl has not?
If the exemption is drafted so it applies only when both parties are minors, then a nineteen-year-old with a seventeen-year-old is not protected. That is the narrowest version of the law. It is also probably the most politically saleable, because it avoids the appearance of shielding adults.
If the exemption is drafted asymmetrically, which is the international norm, then the older partner is protected up to a specified age gap. Under a version drafted for Nepal on the reported Australian three-year model, a nineteen-year-old with a seventeen-year-old would be protected. A twenty-year-old with a seventeen-year-old, probably still protected. A twenty-five-year-old with a seventeen-year-old, not protected. This is closer to what the task force appears to have recommended.
Which version Nepal chooses will matter enormously in practice, and the choice is not neutral. My reading of the political debate so far is that the harder Nepali cases will push the drafters toward the international norm rather than a strictly symmetric version. But that is a prediction, not a fact. The bill has not been written.
The critics
Even the reformers want safeguards. Even the sceptics admit the law as it stands is unjust. The disagreement is not really about the idea of a Romeo and Juliet clause. It is about Nepal.
The former Nepal Bar Association chair, Gopal Krishna Ghimire, has said clearly that laws must evolve with social reality. He backs the reform. He also insists on safeguards against misuse, mechanisms that stop older, exploitative men from claiming the exemption where it does not fit them. Meera Dhungana, the senior advocate on the task force, has said openly that families use rape complaints as leverage after disapproving of a relationship or an inter-caste marriage, and that the law was sometimes "producing injustice instead of protection."
The most substantive critique comes from Mohna Ansari, formerly of the National Human Rights Commission, and from the data collected by the Women's Rehabilitation Centre (WOREC). WOREC documented 1,149 incidents of violence against women in fiscal year 2022 to 2023 alone. Ansari's point is not that the reform is wrong. It is that a close-in-age exemption is a legal instrument, and it does not touch the social conditions that make girls vulnerable. Families that today file rape complaints out of caste disapproval will still be able to do so tomorrow. The provision changes only the legal outcome, not who initiates prosecution. "The law is already being misused even with the age set at 20," she has said. "If an 18 or 19-year-old is in a relationship and the boy is Dalit, the girl's parents may still file rape charges against him."
The real design problem, then, is this. The case for reform is the boy convicted for loving someone his own age. The case for caution is the girl who was groomed into appearing to consent, or the family that will find some other pretext to punish an inter-caste relationship. The law has to hold both realities at the same time, and no clean drafting choice does that on its own.
What happens next
The task force report has been submitted. The Ministry now has to draft an amendment to Section 219. There will be consultations, one hopes real ones, with women's rights organisations, child protection bodies, the Bar, and the district-level actors who see these cases first. A bill will eventually be tabled in the Federal Parliament and reviewed by the Law, Justice and Human Rights Committee. If it passes, the harder work begins: training police, prosecutors, and judges to distinguish an adolescent relationship from a predatory one.
That last part matters as much as the statute itself. In every jurisdiction that has adopted a Romeo and Juliet law, the difference between good implementation and bad has come down to whether frontline actors understand the point of the exemption. The clause is not an amnesty. It is a way of asking a more careful question at the beginning of every case: is this exploitation, or is this adolescence? Adjacent questions will need to be built into police and prosecutorial practice rather than left to individual judges to figure out on appeal. Is the complaint driven by caste? Is the girl herself the complainant, or has her family filed on her behalf? Does she wish to withdraw?
Nepal's Supreme Court has spent the last decade doing exactly that improvisational work, case by case, from Krishna BK to Yadav to Balaju 100. A well-drafted Section 219 amendment would put parliament back in the room. That, on its own, would be a real thing.
A note. This piece describes recommendations submitted to the Ministry of Law in April and May 2026 by an eight-member task force. As of publication the bill has not been drafted or tabled. Precise contours of the exemption, the age gap, the age floor, and the burden of proof, remain to be settled. Nothing here should be read as legal advice for any specific case.
Sources and further reading
Primary reporting
Kathmandu Post, "Nepal prepares softer penalties for consensual adolescent relationships", 18 May 2026. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/05/18/nepal-prepares-softer-penalties-for-consensual-adolescent-relationships Kathmandu Post, "Proposed 'Romeo and Juliet' law may spare boys, but what about girls?", 8 July 2026. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/07/08/proposed-romeo-and-juliet-law-may-spare-boys-but-what-about-girls
Statute
National Penal Code, 2074 (2017), Sections 20 and 219, as amended by the First Amendment Act, 2079 (2022).
Case law, Nepal
Santosh Kumar Yadav v. Government of Nepal, Supreme Court of Nepal, Case No. 075-CR-, decision published 2022. Government of Nepal v. Krishna BK (2017). Sarita Adhikari v. Rajaram Adhikari (2020), Supreme Court of Nepal, Case No. 77-068-00277. Abhimanyu Ahir Yadav v. Government of Nepal (2021), Supreme Court of Nepal. Government of Nepal v. Balaju 100 (2023), Supreme Court of Nepal.
Case law, India
State of Uttar Pradesh v. Anurudh, 2026 SCC OnLine SC 40, decided 9 January 2026. Judgment PDF: https://www.scobserver.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SCOLR_Judgement_State-of-Uttar-Pradesh-v-Anurudh.pdf
Commentary on the Yadav judgment
Al Jazeera Opinions, "Why Nepal's Supreme Court is wrong on child marriages and rape", 29 August 2023. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/8/29/why-nepals-supreme-court-is-wrong-on-child-marriages-and-rape The Himalayan Times, "Editorial: Welcome verdict", 7 August 2023. https://thehimalayantimes.com/opinion/editorial-welcome-verdict
Academic
Alok Atreya, Apurba Acharya, Sudip Paudel and Samata Nepal, "Unintended Consequences: A Critical Analysis of Nepal's Rape Law Reform and Its Impact on Juvenile Justice", Journal of Nepal Health Research Council, Vol. 22, No. 2, Issue 63, April to June 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385559698 Bikash Chapagain and Reena Kumari Shrestha, "Shaping a Child-Centric Legal Doctrine: Evolving Judicial Trends in Nepal's Anti-Child Marriage Rulings", The Informal: South Asian Journal of Human Rights and Social Justice, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2025. https://nepjol.info/index.php/informal/article/download/82395/63017
Juvenile justice reporting
The Himalayan Times, "221 minors escape correction centre in Bhaktapur", 22 August 2023. https://thehimalayantimes.com/kathmandu/221-minors-escape-correction-centre-in-bhaktapur The Himalayan Times, "Probe holds child correction centre responsible for death, mayhem", 2 September 2023. https://thehimalayantimes.com/kathmandu/probe-holds-child-correction-centre-responsible-for-death-mayhem Kathmandu Post, "Custodial deaths go on as perpetrators are left unpunished", 4 September 2023. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2023/09/04/custodial-deaths-go-on-as-perpetrators-are-left-unpunished Kathmandu Post, "Violent incidents at juvenile centres expose managerial lapses", 23 September 2023. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2023/09/23/violent-incidents-at-juvenile-centres-expose-managerial-lapses
Caste dimension
Global Press Journal, "The Forbidden Love Stories of Nepal's Caste System", 10 October 2025. https://globalpressjournal.com/asia/nepal/forbidden-love-stories-nepals-caste-system/
Comparative law
Republic Act No. 11648 (Philippines, 2022), amending the age of sexual consent. Criminal Code of Canada, s. 150.1(2), close-in-age exceptions. Florida Statutes § 794.05; Texas Penal Code § 22.011(e); on close-in-age defences.