AKP President and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on January 16 that they will bring the Second Judicial Package, which is known as "amnesty package" to the Parliament. Making a statement in this direction, Minister Gül said: "We handled to issue technically. The parliament will decide", even though the main issue is the child abuse and the amnesty that will be brought to those abusers.

 

The regulation, which first came to the agenda in 2005 and was prevented by the Criminal Law Reform, came to the agenda again in 2016 after the Constitutional Court abolished the official marriage requirement before the imam marriage.

 

 

The women and the lawyers who continued their objections to the regulation that was brought back to the agenda with the second judicial reform package continued their reactions to the draft with the statements they made in multipal platforms in multipal cities.

 

ATTORNEY YILMAZ: THIS DRAFT MEANS AMNESTY TO CHILD ABUSERS

 

Member of the Human Rights Agenda Attorney Özlem Yılmaz stated that the decision of the Constitutional Court (AYM), which canceled the article that brought the civil marriage condition before the religious marriage in the Turkish Criminal Code, and the three decisions that it asked to introduce amnesty to child sexual abuse in Article 103 should be evaluated together. Stating that the 103rd article discussed in the Turkish Grand National Assembly is connected with these three decisions, Yılmaz underlined that this draft means the amnesty of child abusers for the past, present and future.

 

Yılmaz said: "There are currently 4 thousand people in prison who are married to young girls. If the age difference is 15 or 10, the number of people staying in prison will be 76 due to child sexual abuse crime, others will be released. As you see, it is not just amnesty to child abusers but also when the age difference of the 'peers' is considered 10- 15, the abuse of a 27 year old man to a 12 year old girl will be considered peer marriage and will not be considered a crime. As a lawyer and a woman, this is not acceptable."

 

İzmir Women's Platform Member Günseli Kaya stated that the amnesty debate to child abusers is one of the tools to legitimize the society model that government wants to create.  Kaya said: "This bill gives the man the right to rape anytime. The child or women married in this way will not be able to use their free will ever again. This is purely an expression of religious and ecclesiastical law. So if a man rapes a 9 year old girl and gets married to her, she will be his slave for the rest of her life. There will be no possibility of punishing this crime legally and moreover, it will encourage others to do the same. As women, we will never let this happen."