On Tuesday, April 25, two committees of the European Parliament – the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) and the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) – adopted a historic decision to approve the EU’s accession to the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Suppressing Violence against Women and Domestic Violence .
At issue is the well-known Istanbul Convention, the first legally binding document that creates a comprehensive legal basis for combating violence against girls and women.
MEP Yana Toom (Centre Party / Renew Europe), the shadow rapporteur for this report, called the decision an important step for the full protection of women suffering from violence.
The Istanbul Convention entered into force in 2014, and by now all the member states of the European Union have signed it, as well as the European Union itself. Things are more complicated with ratification, without which the convention does not become a legally binding document: the document was ratified by the parliaments of 21 EU member states, but not in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia. So far, the document has not been ratified even at the European level, although the EU already signed it in 2017.
“I have been dealing with the issue of domestic violence in the European Parliament for six years. There were both presentations and resolutions demanding the ratification of the convention. But again and again we got stuck: it was thought that ratification required the consent of all member states. By the way, there were also black sheep in our herd who opposed it,” explained Yana Toom. “We are talking not only about some countries among those that did not ratify the convention, but also – mainly – about Poland, which ratified the convention, but is looking for ways to get out of it (following the footsteps of Turkey) and has de facto imposed a ban on abortion. However, the European Court of Justice ruled in 2021 that the decision of the Council of Europe does not necessarily have to be unanimous. The pressure on the Council grew and this year a majority of MEPs demanded that the Convention be ratified.
Ratification at the level of the European Union is important because it allows to partially make the Istanbul Convention a law for everyone. “Partly because it is known that the areas of competence of the EU and the member states are strictly divided, and Brussels cannot impose its will on individual countries,” Yana Toom pointed out. “And still, we can apply the convention at the European level in two aspects: the first aspect is legal cooperation in the field of criminal law, the second is the creation of shelters for women victims of violence, as well as implementing the right of a victim of violence not to be extradited to a country where there is a risk of continued violence and violence is justified by “traditions “, “with culture”, “with laws of honor” and so on.”
Among other things, after the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, the European Union can allocate certain funds, namely and only for the creation of shelters for victims of domestic violence. According to statistics, every third European girl falls victim to physical and/or sexual violence at least once in her life after the age of 15.
