JINHA

ANKARA - In Turkey, member of Parliament Aylin Nazlıaka has re-submitted a draft law that would prevent the sentence reductions that courts issue to perpetrators of femicide.

Aylin Nazlıaka, the Ankara representative for the CHP, previously submitted the same law in January 2015. Since then, the June 7 general election has changed the landscape of Turkey's Parliament, with the ruling AKP losing the seats necessary to form a single-party ruling government, as it has in the past. The last 13 years of AKP rule have seen the rate of femicide skyrocket in Turkey.

The draft law calls for an addition to the Turkish criminal code that explicitly states that there are no sentence reductions possible for "provocation" of "good behavior" in cases of killings of women and children. According to the news website Bianet, men killed 281 women in Turkey in 2014.

When such cases reached the court, Aylin said in her presentation of the bill, it was women and girls' clothes and makeup that went on trial, while male perpetrators were regularly given large reductions in their sentences for reasons like "wearing a suit to court." She said that removing the sentence reductions available for these crimes would help protect women's right to life.

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