The Commission on Women's Rights of the United Nations, at its fourth session, held last year, adopted a resolution requesting the Secretary-General of the United Nations to obtain from the member states and from the non-governmental organizations reliable information concerning the status of woman in the personal status laws of the various countries, and to submit to it a detailed report on this information.

In this article we shall review the regulations concerning engagement and marriage as laid down in the personal status laws of the countries covered by the report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Engagement and its legal effect:

The Secretary-General opens his report by noting that engagement is the mutual pledge between a man and a woman to marry, and he adds that the legal character and the provisions of this pledge vary markedly with the difference of legal systems in the countries of the world, according to those countries' traditions and customs.

In the Anglo-Saxon system, engagement gives rise to an obligation to marry. If the sanctity of this obligation is violated, the injured party has the right to claim damages for the loss and injury suffered, including social injury.

In Britain, for example, if one party breaks off the engagement, the other party may sue the first for breach of the promise

of marriage, and may be compensated for the substantial damages incurred. Statistics show that most of these cases are brought by women, not by men.

This system is followed in Australia as well: if the obligations of engagement are cast aside, recourse may be had to the courts... And in Australia, as in Britain, the number of women litigants exceeds that of men in cases arising from broken engagements.

In the United States of America, the rules of engagement and marriage differ from one state to another. The laws of a number of these states recognize engagement and regard it as having binding effect toward marriage in the eyes of the law, allowing the injured party to sue the party who has broken the pledge. But the number of these states is gradually shrinking.

The Germanic legal systems provide that if one party breaks the pledge of marriage, he is liable to pay material damages in proportion to the losses suffered by the other party.

The Scandinavian countries, for their part, do not regard engagement as binding toward marriage. But these countries, with the exception of Norway, require the party who breaks off the engagement to pay the expenses incurred by the other party in preparation for the marriage.

In France, a promise of marriage carries no legal obligation; the French courts, however, have made it their practice to hold

the party who breaks off an engagement liable to pay damages, if the breaking off has caused injury. A number of the Latin American states have borrowed the principles of French law, and the laws of these states have stripped engagement of its legal effect — the law followed in Chile, Colombia, Argentina, and Venezuela provides that engagement is a private personal matter left to a man's honor and his conscience.

In Poland, where the courts may not regard engagement as ground for compelling any party to marry, the law nevertheless entitles the injured party to obtain damages from the party