Irish Centre for Human Rights Blog

Judit Villena Rodó is an Irish Research Council, Government of Ireland PhD scholar working on migrant women’s right to access remedies for coercive control in Ireland and Spain. She focuses on the implementation of the Istanbul Convention’s normative framework, and is interested in gender and human rights, feminist theories and migration.

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In the early morning hours of Saturday the 20^th of March, the increasingly conservative Turkish government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, withdrew Turkey’s signature to the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, known as the Istanbul Convention. The move prompted an array of responses of outrage from civil society, women’s rights groups, human rights experts and academics, in Turkey and beyond, labelling the withdrawal a clear affront to women’s rights. Thousands of Turkish women took to the streets demanding the decision be revoked, and Council of Europe Secretary General, Marija Pejčinović Burić stated that Turkey’s move compromises the protection of women in Turkey, ‘across Europe and beyond’. Turkey is the first country to have withdrawn from the Istanbul Convention, but not the first one to threaten to do so. In summer 2020, Poland issued a declaration of intention to withdraw from the Convention, and allegedly started moving diplomatic strings to replace the Convention with a ‘family rights treaty’.

The value of the Istanbul Convention in fighting against gender-based violence

The Istanbul Convention is considered the gold standard for the protection of women’s right to live a life free from violence, and its applicability transcends the confines of the Council of Europe, as the Convention is open for signature beyond Member States. The Convention builds upon international and regional human rights standards, such as the CEDAW Convention and its jurisprudence, the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, the Belém do Pará Convention and the Maputo Protocol to the African Charter. The Istanbul Convention is arguably the most comprehensive treaty on violence against women, as it reinforces and expands existing human rights standards. In doing so, the Convention lays out a holistic framework that requires states to put in place laws and integrated policies to prevent violence, protect victim-survivors, and ensure prosecution. 

The Istanbul Convention is the first legally binding human rights instrument labelling violence against women as a human rights violation in and of itself. Similar to the CEDAW framework, the Istanbul Convention recognises in its preamble that violence against women is a structural issue and a manifestation of the ‘historically unequal’ gender and power relations. The Convention clearly sets out its purposes in article 1, identifying the need for protection, prevention, prosecution of violence; the design of a comprehensive framework of assistance to victims; and the promotion of international and enhanced co-operation between actors to eliminate violence against women, with the ultimate goal of the elimination of discrimination against women and the promotion of substantive equality and women’s empowerment. Moreover, as Gizem Guney explains, the Convention furnishes the Council of Europe with an additional, more specialised ‘legal authority to determine state responsibility in addressing violence against women’, as its implementation is monitored by an independent expert group, GREVIO, mandated inter alia to evaluate State Parties’ implementation of the Convention. 

Turkey’s withdrawal: a set back to women’s right to live a life free from violence

Violence against women constitutes an endemic and pervasive pattern of human rights violations throughout the world. As evidenced by Concluding Observations issued by CEDAW and GREVIO’s monitoring reports under the Istanbul Convention, states are afforded and avail of a wide discretion as to how they implement human rights standards. This results in broad discrepancies as to attention given to combat violence against women. Interestingly, Turkey has not justified its withdrawal by denying violence against women is a pressing issue. On the contrary, the government issued a statement arguing that their decision to withdraw  ‘by no means denotes that [Turkey] “compromises the protection of women”’ and that it intends to ‘continue protecting the safety and rights of all women’. 

This assertion is, of course, absolutely at odds with the decision to withdraw from a treaty adopted specifically for the purposes of protecting women against gender-based violence. However, it can be interpreted as Turkey being oblivious or unwilling to see the link between ‘discriminatory stereotypes concerning the roles and responsibilities of women and men in family and society’ and violence against women, as GREVIO reported in Turkey’s evaluation under the Convention in 2017. This allows Turkey to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, whilst arguing that it cares about women’s rights to live a life free from violence, because it does not perceive violence against women as a structural issue.

Despite not formally detailing in its statement the reasons behind the president’s withdrawal, the government cited an alleged hijacking of the Convention by ‘people attempting to normalize homosexuality – which is incompatible with [Turkey]’s social and family values’. Seemingly, they believe the Convention poses a threat to the traditional Turkish family – allegedly formed by a married man and woman. Although it has not expanded on its reasoning, similar arguments have been made in the past arguing against the Convention’s provisions protecting women from violence regardless of their marriage status, or against the legal definition of gender as a ‘social construct’. How have we arrived at this point in which government-endorsed discriminatory practices and anti-rights rhetoric have led to the withdrawal of one of the most comprehensive instruments for the protection of women? 

Even though Erdoğan and his party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), have become increasingly conservative over the past decade it has been reported that this move is the product of months of intensive conservative lobbying. Far from being unique to Turkey, conservative lobbying has been concentrated on normalising an anti-rights narrative in other parts of Europe as well.  Turkey’s statement reads: 

‘[Turkey] is not the only country who has serious concerns about the Istanbul Convention. Six members of the European Union (Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia) did not ratify the Istanbul Convention. Poland has taken steps to withdraw from the Convention, citing an attempt by the LGBT community to impose their ideas about gender on the entire society.’

In assessing Turkey’s withdrawal two important concerns arise. The first refers to the practical and negative consequences that it has for victim-survivors of violence against women and their legal protection. Since the State will no longer be bound by the Convention, it is highly unlikely that the Convention’s transformative potential will be felt and implemented. Turkish feminist groups consider Erdoğan’s withdrawal as further challenge to democratic norms, as it was carried out unilaterally without any parliamentary debate or agreement. Başak Çalı explains in a blog post that the decision’s constitutional validity is called into question with ‘women’s rights groups, bar associations and citizens’ asserting they will seek to judicially challenge it. 

The second concern relates to the message the withdrawal sends. As the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women stated, the move ‘sends a dangerous message that violence against women is not important, with the risk of encouraging perpetrators and weakening measures to prevent it’. The move legitimises the already normalised ultra-conservative rhetoric prevalent in Europe and beyond, which hides behind the denunciation of a supposedly insidious ‘gender ideology’. In the name of protecting the ‘traditional family’, this rhetoric serves to negate the right to non-discrimination and equality for women and other ‘marginalised groups’ in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Continuing advocacy and solidarity

Leaders at the Council of Europe, as well as UN experts have called on Turkey to reconsider its decision, and UN Women has urged Turkey to ‘continue protecting and promoting the safety and rights of all women and girls, including by remaining committed to the full implementation of the Istanbul Convention’. Even though I appreciate the necessity of human rights experts and institutions in engaging in constructive dialogue with Turkey, the political message sent by Turkey’s move against feminist and human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination must not be understated, and must be recognised as a fundamental threat to women’s rights. Mohanty (2003) calls on all of us to build ‘feminist solidarities across the divisions of place, identity, class, work, belief’. In this case, we must stand in solidarity with Turkish women, and contribute to the global unmasking of transnational movements obstructing women’s rights, whilst demanding the immediate fulfilment of the central right to live a life free from gender-based violence.