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Turkey will withdraw from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, also known as Istanbul Convention. This was announced by the government chaired by Erdogan, the same one who first signed the document in 2011.
The Turkish president has made the withdrawal official with a presidential decree that according to some responds to the need to curry favor with the more conservative base of the electorate, the one still linked to a concept of More radical Islam.
The news sparked several protests in the capital, with hundreds of women who took to the streets to demonstrate against a measure that leads the country to take significant steps backwards on the civil rights front.
The Instabul Convention was signed ten years ago and entered into force in 2014 with the aim of establishing equal rights, obliging state authorities to take measures to prevent gender-based violence, protect victims and prosecute those responsible. In the years following the ratification, Erdogan had often cited that document as an emblem of Turkey’s alleged advances in the field of gender equality and the fight against discrimination, only to start taking a few steps back in the last period, that is, since the style government of the Turkish president has become increasingly authoritarian.
The government has approached the more conservative Islamic groups, which also include many members of Erdogan’s party, according to which the Convention is contrary to the norms of Islam and it would incite divorce and homosexuality, undermining family unity through the use of terms such as “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”.
For this reason, for a year already in Turkey there was talk of the possibility of breaking the commitments made by withdrawing from the Convention; hypothesis that had sparked several protests and demonstrations throughout the country. A country in which there were over 400 femicides in 2020 alone and which started 2021 with an alarming trend: 65 femicides in the first 65 days, which means that a woman every day died at the hands of a man.
According to the WHO, 40 per cent of Turkish women are victims of violence committed by their partners, when in the rest of Europe the average is 25 per cent (a monstrous number in any case).
Among these also Melek Ipek, who has become a symbolic case of women’s battle for their rights. Melek killed her husband last January after he had her handcuffed naked and left tied up for a whole night while he beat her, raped her and threatened her in front of their 9 and 7 year old daughters. When he got out, she took a gun and shot him. She called the police in Antalya herself, the city where she lives. Now she is on trial and faces life imprisonment, but the associations in defense of women’s rights have taken her case as a warning and an example and are fighting so that it can be considered a legitimate defense. Not only that: according to the Antalya Feminist Kolektif group, if the 31-year-old had been able to report her husband and obtain the right psychological support and support, there would have been no murder.
In this context, the words of the Turkish vice-president, Fiat Oktay, who commenting on the decision to withdraw from the Convention wrote on Twitter that the solution to “raise the dignity of Turkish women” lies “in our traditions and customs”, not in ‘ imitation of external examples, they seem even more absurd.
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