ECHR says 300-day waiting period for Turkish women to remarry after divorce is ‘gender discrimination’

Duvar English

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that the 300-day waiting period for Turkish women to remarry after divorce is “gender discrimination.”

Adjudicating Nurcan Bayraktar's case against Turkey, the ECHR stated that the said practice violated the European Convention on Human Rights, BBC Turkish reported on June 27.

Laws in Turkey require women to wait a minimum of 300 days after their divorce is finalized to marry someone different from their ex-spouse. Women who do not want to wait for this period need to prove with medical tests that they are not pregnant.

The ECHR decided that the 300-day waiting period and the request for a medical document to prove that one is not pregnant in order to shorten this period cannot be justified, thus violating the plaintiff's right to respect for private life.

The ECHR found the practice “directly a gender discrimination” and that the argument that it was a measure taken to prevent uncertainty over the identity of the father of the child to be born could not justify this discrimination.

The decision also stated that the aim of preventing “confusion in the genealogy,” that is, to determine who the biological father is, has no place in modern society.