The Istanbul Convention, or the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, turns twelve on 11 May 2023. Born within the Council of Europe in 2011, the Convention is the most wide-ranging binding international treaty for addressing this serious form of human rights violation.

Its objectives are to prevent violence, protect victims and prosecute their perpetrators. It urges and monitors signatories to bring their laws into line by providing for all the new categories of offence identified by the Convention: not only physical violence, therefore, but also psychological violence and violence linked to social constructs.

The Istanbul Convention aims to make gender-based violence intolerable and lays the foundations for making women's lives safer both inside and outside the home and beyond European borders. The treaty has indeed been ratified by European Union countries as well as non-EU ones, since the Council of Europe is a body extended to 47 member states.

The Istanbul Convention is going through a turbulent phase of its life: for the first time a country, Turkey, has decided to withdraw, and other members have long shown scepticism and second thoughts, such as Poland and Hungary.

• The history of the Istanbul Convention
• Which countries are signatories to the Istanbul Convention
• 5 things to know about the Istanbul Convention
• 5 false myths about the Istanbul Convention

The history of the Istanbul Convention

What was signed on 11 May 2011 remains arguably one of the most impactful treaties in the world for the protection of human rights, from a legal, cultural and political standpoint: for the first time violence against women is defined as a human rights violation and a form of discrimination. It establishes that a state which does not do enough to respond to situations of this kind must be held responsible for that very violence.

The text has roots that stretch back a long way, to the 1990s, when the Council of Europe, an international organisation founded in 1949 and today comprising 47 member states with the aim of promoting democracy, human rights, European cultural identity and the search for solutions to social problems in Europe, became aware of the scale of the issue of gender-based violence. At the end of 2008 the Council set up a task force of experts to prepare a draft convention establishing criteria to be applied at a global level to combat the phenomenon.

The result of this work is the treaty, which entered into force in 2014 upon ratification by the tenth signatory country: it is the first binding international instrument to create a comprehensive legal framework for protecting women from any form of violence, and prevents, prosecutes and eliminates violence against women and domestic violence. The Convention also establishes a specific monitoring mechanism (known as Grevio) in order to ensure the effective implementation of its provisions by the parties.

Consiglio d'Europa @coe_ita

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Loujain Alhathloul, attivista saudita per i diritti umani delle donne, è la vincitrice dell'ottavo Premio Václav Havel per i diritti umani.

coe.int/it/web/portal/…

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Which countries are signatories to the treaty

In 2011, the original signatories to the treaty were Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden and Turkey. The agreement was subsequently signed by 45 countries, but ratified (and therefore actually brought into force) by only 20 of these, including Italy in 2013: in our country on 19 June of ten years ago, after unanimous approval by the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate voted on the document with 274 votes in favour and a single abstention. The last country to ratify the Convention was Moldova, in October 2021. But the treaty also officially entered into force for the European Union from 1 October 2023, and it can also be ratified by countries that are not members of the Council of Europe but that have participated in various capacities in drafting the text, such as the United States, Canada, Kazakhstan, Japan, Mexico and the Holy See.

Daniel Holtgen @DanielHoltgen

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Secretary General Marija Pejčinović Burić:
“Turkey‘s announced withdrawal from the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on violence against women is a huge setback, compromising the protection of women in Turkey, across Europe and beyond.”

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Five things to know about the Istanbul Convention

1. What the Convention's 4Ps are

Often, when speaking of sustainable development, the 3Ps are mentioned — that is, the three keywords people, planet, prosperity. Well, the Ps on which the Istanbul Convention is based are as many as four, and they provide an excellent basis for understanding its terms: prevent, protect, prosecute, integrated policies.

The first is prevent, and concerns the cultural dimension of the problem: rooting out the cultural reasons that lead to gender-based violence, changing the attitudes, gender roles and stereotypes that make violence against women acceptable; raising public awareness of the various forms of violence and their traumatic impact; including pedagogical materials on the theme of gender equality in teaching programmes at every level of education; cooperating with non-governmental organisations, the media and the private sector to raise awareness among the general public.

The second is protect victims, and concerns the social dimension: ensuring that the measures adopted place particular emphasis on the needs and safety of victims; establishing special protection services, to provide medical and psychological support and legal advice to victims and their children; establishing shelters and reception centres in sufficient numbers and dedicated free helplines, operational 24 hours a day.

Elena Bonetti ✓ @elenabonetti

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Si è riunita oggi la Cabina di Regia Nazionale sulla violenza maschile contro le donne, il percorso che si è delineato oggi segna i passi in avanti che il nuovo Piano Strategico farà compiere al Paese nell’attuazione della Convenzione di Istanbul. facebook.com/11041589033826…

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The third is the p of prosecute, and addresses the criminal aspect of violence: ensuring that it is duly punished; ensuring that culture, traditions and customs, religion or so-called "honour" cannot justify any act of violence; ensuring that victims have access to special protective measures during investigations and judicial proceedings; ensuring that the law enforcement services responsible for upholding the law respond immediately to requests for assistance.

Finally, the last is that of integrated policies, and it goes without saying that this is a matter of institutional responsibility: ensuring that all the measures listed above form part of a package of coordinated and comprehensive policies and offer an all-encompassing response to violence against women and domestic violence.

2. It is the instrument that enables precise monitoring of femicides

In fact, before the Istanbul treaty was adopted, no country in the world had ever carried out an annual census of femicides. Only in 2017 did the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (and in Italy the state police) begin to calculate them on the basis of the very definition given by the Convention, that of killings of women occurring within the family, for reasons of gender. Without a precise delineation of what constitutes femicide, it would not have been possible to create a real mapping of the phenomenon.

Council of Europe @coe

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In its most dramatic expressions violence against women kills.

Nothing can justify 137 lives/day.

The #IstanbulConventionSavesLives and it’s the most advanced instrument to prevent and combat #violenceagainstwomen.

coe.int/en/web/istanbu…

@CoE_endVAW @unodc @UN_Women

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3. It introduced new categories of offence that were not previously prosecutable

The Istanbul Convention includes a detailed list of gender-based offences that the signatory countries commit to combating: psychological violence, stalking and persecutory acts, physical violence, sexual violence, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, forced abortion and forced sterilisation, and sexual harassment. Some of these were, to all intents and purposes, new categories of offence not yet provided for in the legal systems of many countries, such as female genital mutilation, forced marriage, stalking (persecutory acts), forced abortion and forced sterilisation.

States will therefore be required to introduce into their legal systems important new categories of offence that were not yet covered. Following the Convention's ratification, for example, in 2019 Italy passed the so-called Codice rosso, which punishes revenge porn precisely as a form of psychological violence.

4. Why it is called the Istanbul Convention when Istanbul is not part of it

In 2011 Turkey was among the most committed supporters of the treaty, which was indeed signed in Istanbul — an ideal bridge, not only geographical, between Europe and Asia, but also for human rights. On 12 March 2012 Turkey was also the first country to ratify it. Nine years later, in March 2020, on the back of a slow but progressive curtailment of civil liberties, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed the decree withdrawing Turkey's accession, explaining that the treaty "threatens family rights".

5. It has not yet been ratified by several European Union countries

While Turkey is the first country to withdraw from the agreement, even within the democratic European Union the front is not unified: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Moldova and