Photo taken on Feb. 3 of 2016 in downtown Harare, Zimbabwe, showing hundreds of Zimbabwean, mainly women and girls, march in the streets to support a high court decision to ban child marriage.

BERLIN, June 3 (Xinhua) -- The German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) passed a new law on Friday declaring marriages of under 16-year-olds null and void.

Furthermore, marriages are to be annulled by a court if one of the spouses was between 16 and 18 years of age when the legal partnership was originally entered.

The law mandates that such marriages can only be upheld in exceptional circumstances, including a provision that both partners have since come of age and formally confirm their marital commitment again.

The legislation applies to marriages entered in Germany as well as abroad.

The minimum age for marriage in Germany is henceforth set at 18.

The Left (Die Linke) and Green (Gruene) parties criticized the law as excessively generalizing and voted against its passage in the Federal Parliament.

However, the Women's Rights Organization Terre des Femmes (TDF) welcomed the legal clarity which the new regulation creates.

Previously, decisions on the minimum age of marriage in Germany were largely reached on a case-by-case basis.

TDF director Crista Stolle said, "Girls who are married underage are often dependent on their husband and cannot determine their own life choices."

Following a long trend of decline in the incidence of child marriages in Germany, the topic has received renewed interest as a consequence of the arrival of more than 1 million refugees, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, since 2015.

The number of child marriages in Germany was estimated at 1,500 in 2016 with 360 thereof entered into by an individual under the age of 14.

Federal Minister of Justice Heiko Maas (Social Democratic Party), a driving force behind the law, was quoted in April expressing his view that "There must be no child marriages in Germany. Children do not belong in front of the altar."