1ST LEAD Turkey's premier puts brakes on controversial sex offenders bill By Shabtai Gold

Istanbul (dpa) - Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Tuesday that he was sending back to a parliamentary commission a controversial draft bill that would have allowed sex offenders to marry underage girls they had abused, thereby evading punishment.The move is embarassing for Yildirim‘s Islamic-conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had said the one-off measure would affect some 3,000 men either in jail or awaiting prosecution. Widespread protests against the legislation convulsed the country during the weekend. Secular opposition parties and the UN agencies for women and children‘s rights opposed the bill, which was set to go up for a vote in parliament later in the day.The largest opposition party, the centre-left People‘s Republican Party (CHP), invited a large number of women‘s groups to parliament, as party chief Kemal Kilicdaroglu blasted the law, saying there was no way for an underage girl to give consent to marriage.Critics said the bill could effectively act as a means to retroactively legalize cases of rape and would not help in the battle against child marriages. Even in pro-government circles, there was dismay with the bill."The withdrawal of the law is on point; what it being defended is neither legal nor Islamic! In Islam, sexual abuse is forbidden, a crime," Ayse Bohurler, a prominent conservative journalist who was involved in founding the ruling party, said on her Twitter feed.The government had insisted the bill, proposed by members of the ruling AKP, was not an amnesty for abusers and would not apply in cases of force. The bill was meant to be a one-off law that would only affect open cases retroactively. The men in question would have to marry their victims and punishment would be deferred as long as the marriage held, or if the man was not the one to initiate a divorce. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan late Monday stepped into the fray, calling for a consensus to be reached on the law and noting there had been criticism to the bill. The legal age for marriage in Turkey is 17, but a court can allow a 16-year-old to marry.There are many thousands of cases of underage marriage in Turkey each year, according to estimates by activists, though exact numbers are hard to determine. Turkey‘s Constitutional Court this year ordered the government to review mandatory minimum sentencing laws for the abuse of minors.