Problematika Administrasi Pencatatan Nikah Bagi Masyarakat Di Wilayah Pedesaan

Marriage registration provides legal certainty for husbands, wives, and children, yet unregistered marriages (nikah siri) persist in rural areas. This article maps the causes of administrative problems in marriage registration in rural communities, analyzes their legal and social impacts, and formulates an integrated resolution strategy. It is an empirical legal study with a qualitative approach conducted in Gunung Tua Jae Village, Padang Bolak District, North Padang Lawas Regency. Data were collected through interviews, observation, and documentation, together with legal materials, national journal articles, and published religious-court case statistics, and analyzed descriptively and analytically using Radbruch's legal certainty theory, maslahah mursalah, and Soekanto's theory of legal effectiveness. The findings identify six obstacles: distance and limited access to services, low legal literacy, indirect costs, incomplete civil documents, child marriage, and unofficial intermediaries, all rooted in weaknesses across the five factors of legal effectiveness. The surge in marriage dispensation applications since 2019 makes the age requirement a new pressure point for registration services. Unregistered marriages weaken a wife's ability to prove her status, complicate children's documents, and limit access to public services. The article proposes an Integrated Rural Marriage Registration Service model combining upstream prevention and downstream remedy, to be tested in other locations.