The court's ruling on Friday argued that it was not possible to indict solely religiously married couples, while it was legal for a woman and a man to live together in Turkey without a religious wedding.
"While individuals practically living together and having children without a religious ceremony or wedding are not being punished, punishing people who made choices in terms of their private lives and had religious marriages displays the [regulation's] intemperance on the issue," the Constitutional Court said.
The judgement has been slammed by many in Turkey from government officials to lawyers and human rights groups.
In a televised interview on Friday, Aysenur Islam, Turkey's minister for family and social policies, said that a legislation or repeal of a legislation which will encourage underage marriages cannot be tolerated by our ministry.
"Now that this ruling has been taken, we will have to work [on a new legislation] to prevent children under the age of 18 to be married off through unofficial marriages," she said.
"Everybody knows that underage marriage is illegal in Turkey. And a number of such marriages has significantly decreased, but we have to keep our campaign against them."
No rule against living together'
As there is no regulation in Turkey on couples who live together or have extramarital children, their relationships have no legal status without any rights or penalties.
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| The Constituional Court defended its judgement [AFP] |
Paragraph six of the same article stipulated that individual who carried out a religious wedding ceremony without seeing the relevant civil marriage document should also be imprisoned for two to six months.
The ruling is related to a case appealed to the Constitutional Court by a criminal court in Erzurum, an eastern province of Turkey, on three citizens, two religiously married couple and a local religious leader who carried out the ceremony.
In 1999, the Constitutional Court made a converse ruling in another case and decided that couples living together did not constitute a crime in line with the Turkish Criminal Code, while only religiously married weds do so.
'Against principles of law'
Turkish human rights lawyer Ergin Cinmen told Al Jazeera that the court’s judgement is legally intact in terms of local regulations in Turkey, but it is contradictory to certain aspects of public law, principle of equality, principal of social state and certain social realities in the country.
"The principles of social state and state of law put foremost importance children's and women's rights," he said.
"If you get rid of obligation of civic marriage before religious marriage, this will cause problems in terms of children's and women's rights coming from their links to the family, particularly regarding inheritance rights. Although it is legally intact, the verdict is not compatible with certain aspects of the general principle of law."
The Federation of Turkish Women's Associations said in a declaration on Saturday that the judgement would increase the number of men marrying multiple women, underage marriages, paid marriages, and infringements of women's rights in relation to marriages.
The declaration added that the group would take the case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
ECHR rulings are binding for Turkey, given that the country is a party to the European Convention of Human Rights, the founding treaty of the international organisation.
In a 2010 judgement, the ECHR ruled that a solely religiously married Turkish woman had no inheritance rights to her deceased husband's assets, arguing that the state had no obligation to recognise religious marriage.
Source: Al Jazeera