Istanbul Convention Saves Lives - But Turkiye Withdrew From It

Author: Irem Cakmak, LLM

July 1, 2026

Women holding a sign that says “Reverse the decision, enforce the Convention.” [Image credit: Emir Eğricesu on Unsplash]

Effective from July 1, 2021, Turkiye officially withdrew from the Istanbul Convention. The Convention was drafted by the Council of Europe, following a domestic violence case of gender-based violence and femicide within Turkiye itself. Turkiye became the first signatory and the first withdrawal from the convention. The withdrawal was justified under the pretext that the treaty undermined traditional family values. Despite promises made during the withdrawal process that women’s rights would remain protected, five years after the withdrawal, an alarming backlash has occurred in gender equality and women’s rights. 

About the Istanbul Convention and Its Necessity

The Istanbul Convention asserts that violence against women is a type of gender-based violence that women are subjected to, simply because they are women. The Convention highlights that gender-based violence is systemic and therefore imposes an obligation to combat it as such. To prevent violence against women, it includes legally binding regulations in the areas of prevention, protection, prosecution, and policies such as the requirement for improved data collection and increased awareness campaigns. By stating that anyone can become a victim of gender-based violence, it calls attention to the fact that women are disproportionately affected by it, which must be considered. The Convention establishes an independent expert body and a political body for monitoring. 

Even if a state has domestic legal frameworks aimed at preventing violence against women, it is important to sign the Istanbul Convention. In Turkiye, Law No. 6284 was drafted in parallel with the Istanbul Convention following efforts by women’s organizations. However, domestic laws might fall short of current protection standards compared to international treaties. For example, while Law No. 6284 addresses gender-based violence and its dangers on an individual basis through protection and support mechanisms, the Istanbul Convention approaches the issue systematically, requiring the states to dismantle structural inequalities through educational programs and policies. Moreover,  domestic mechanisms for enforcing national law can become unreliable in countries where judicial independence is compromised. In this regard, the existence of regional and international monitoring mechanisms is crucial in preventing human rights violations. The Istanbul Convention directly provides this safeguard. 

Other international human rights conventions mutually enforce the Istanbul Convention. The Convention’s regard for United Nations Treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in its preamble, shows its position within the broader context of international human rights law and gender justice. Despite the existence of other international and regional treaties protecting women’s rights, it is important for states to sign the Istanbul Convention as well. 

CEDAW, established by the United Nations, is one of the fundamental international treaties with a global impact centered on women’s rights. While CEDAW has a scope that encompasses political, social, economic, and cultural rights, the Istanbul Convention specifically focuses on violence against women. For this reason, the Istanbul Convention provides a more specialized protection in the field of preventing violence against women. The CEDAW Committee refers to the Istanbul Convention to evaluate whether participating states are fulfilling their duties to prevent gender-based violence. Consequently, even for states that have signed the CEDAW, signing the Istanbul Convention is important in providing specialized protection for women’s rights and gender equality.

Turkiye and the Convention

The Council of Europe proposed the preparation of a convention focusing on ending violence against women and domestic violence, following the European Court of Human Rights ruling against Turkiye in the Opuz case. In this landmark case, the state had failed to protect Nahide Opuz from continuous death threats and physical violence, which ultimately culminated in her being stabbed seven times and the murder of her mother. This marked the first time gender-based violence was recognized as a form of discrimination under the European Convention on Human Rights. As a direct result of this process, Turkiye became the first state to sign the Istanbul Convention in 2011.

However, in March 2021, the government announced its intention to withdraw from the Convention and notified the Council of Europe. Three months later, on July 1, 2021, the withdrawal officially came into effect.  The official withdrawal statement explained that “the Istanbul Convention, originally intended to promote women’s rights, was hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality, which is incompatible with Turkiye’s social and family values.” No further explanation was provided regarding hijacking allegations or the scope of Turkiye’s family values. The statement included promises that there would be no regression in women’s rights, but these promises were left unfulfilled. 

The rationale behind the withdrawal was to protect national values and state sovereignty against foreign ideological imposition. This rationale shifts the discourse on women and LGBTIQ+ rights away from a human rights domain into the spheres of sovereignty and ideology. 

The withdrawal decision was met with immense backlash both domestically and internationally. Women’s and LGBTIQ+ rights defenders organized numerous peaceful protests across the country, which faced police brutality. Additionally, civil society organizations that opposed the decision were fined. Other states and international institutions, including the United States President, Joe Biden, and the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, strongly condemned the decision. 

Additionally, the fact that the withdrawal decision was not carried out in accordance with domestic law also drew criticism. Women’s and LGBTIQ+ organizations, bar associations, trade union representatives, and political parties have filed more than 200 lawsuits challenging the decision’s unlawfulness and demanding its annulment. These efforts ultimately proved unsuccessful. 

President Erdogan’s response to these criticisms was, “We made our call, we left the convention as we entered it. We let them know of our decision, so it's a done deal.” Subsequent research showed that the withdrawal decision, the government’s handling of opposition to it, and the subsequent regression in women’s rights had a highly negative impact on Turkiye’s international reputation. It also signals a broader setback in women’s rights, gender equality, and the rule of law. 

A woman holding a sign that says, “We are not accepting your mindset that sees women only as a part of the family.” [Image credit: Efekan Akyüz on Unsplash]

Women Subordinated to Family

The government weaponizes the Istanbul Convention’s protections for LGBTIQ+ individuals as a smoke screen to conceal its own unwillingness to protect women from male violence and discrimination. By blaming alleged LGBTIQ+ manipulation for the withdrawal, without providing any further explanation regarding the distortion itself, the state effectively turns a marginalized community into a scapegoat for the broader rollback of women’s rights. Instead of strengthening enforcement and preventing misuse, the government chose to strip away the Istanbul Convention’s protections entirely. Ultimately, this finger-pointing serves to disguise a deeper ideological shift towards a reluctance to guarantee gender equality.

The concept of “family values” is being used as a tool to exclude not only members of the LGBTIQ+ community, but also women who do not fit in these standards, from state protection against male violence. The ruling party has been exhibiting an approach that ignores women outside of their relationship with the “family”, solely prioritizing the identities of wife and mother. One of the most explicit examples of this situation is the transformation of the “Ministry of Women” to the “Ministry of Women and Family Affairs” in 2011, and later to the “Ministry of Family and Social Services” in 2018. Moreover, the year 2025, which marked the fourth anniversary of the withdrawal from the Convention,  was declared the Year of the Family, allegedly putting “strong women, strong family, strong Turkiye at the center of” the policies to support “children at every stage of their lives, from birth to all levels of their education, from getting a job to getting a job to getting married.” While there has been a lack of official data, the Federation of the Women's Associations reports that in the Year of the Family, femicide rates reached an alarming level, with at least 391 women killed by men. Rather than addressing the male violence crisis, women’s rights issues have been swept under the carpet. In this context, women are reduced to traditional gender roles under the guise of family values. 

Examining Turkiye’s government rhetoric, one can infer that the ideal woman, worthy of State protection, is a cisgender, heterosexual individual who is married to a man or lives with her family, is a housewife, has children, and votes for the ruling party. Conversely, identities that do not conform to these gender norms or fit into the heterosexual family model have been stigmatized. Erdogan and other ruling party members have reinforced this bias through public statements, asserting that “a women’s sole career should be motherhood,” “a woman who abstains from maternity by saying ‘I am working’ means that she is actually denying her femininity,” “a rapist is more innocent than a rape victim who has an abortion,” and even “women should give birth “at least three times.” This dehumanizing rhetoric is also weaponized against politically active women, as demonstrated during a parliamentary group meeting in 2022 when Erdogan referred to women who participated in the Gezi Park protests as “rotten” and “sl*ts.” Another example  of the stigmatization occurred in October 2025, when a draft of the omnibus reform law revealed plans to criminalize behaviour deemed “contrary to biological sex and general morality,” including its so-called “promotion.” 

From explicit humiliation and the systemic institutionalization of discrimination through legal channels, it is clear that only a specific group of women is deemed worthy of protection against male violence. However, the data does not support the impression that the Turkish government is trying to create. For instance, while the government encourages women to withdraw from professional life, 64.7% of the women killed in 2025, the Year of the Family, were killed by men inside their own homes. Moreover, in 2023, 90% of the perpetrators in gender-based violence incidents were men, 63% being spouses, followed by 21% family members. Evidently, this arbitrary distinction between women who conform to family values and other ‘non-conforming’ women benefits no women at all.  When policies erase women as individual rights-holders and focus on family, the state can more easily mask its systemic shortcomings in protection and accountability. 

Aftermath of the Withdrawal

Since the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, male violence and the number of femicides have risen significantly in Turkiye. In the Women, Peace and Security Index, the country ranked 106th in 2025. According to the Monument Counter (Anıt Sayaç), a civil initiative that tracks and honors the victims of femicide, 415 women were killed by men in 2022, 420 in 2023, 455 in 2024, and 459 in 2025.

This increase stems from the systemic abandonment that victims of gender-based violence face at every stage of their access to justice. Law enforcement agencies frequently dismiss gender-based violence as a private domestic dispute rather than a criminal offence. In many cases of gender-based violence, law enforcement fails to employ prevention mechanisms by either disregarding women’s formal requests for protection or not properly enforcing the protection orders. Last year alone, 23 women were killed because their protection orders were unenforced. 

Furthermore, effective investigations into cases of gender-based violence are severely lacking. For example, in many instances of suspicious deaths, the prosecution routinely classifies the incidents as suicides without conducting a thorough investigation. While the efforts of civil society occasionally correct judicial shortcomings on a case-by-case basis, women subjected to gender-based violence are systematically abandoned by the state. In 2024 alone, the number of women who allegedly committed suicide by jumping from heights has reached more than 250 cases, which sparked a social media activism campaign under the slogan “If I fall from a balcony, do not believe it. I love life.”

Additionally, existing criminal penalties are not implemented consistently. This creates a climate of impunity where perpetrators of gender-based violence face minimal consequences, either receiving disproportionately light sentences, receiving amnesty, or not being held accountable altogether. 

Lack of effective protection against gender-based violence places many women in danger through an intersectional lens. Many women face heightened risk due to their gender intersecting with other aspects of their identity, including immigration status, poverty, and disability. For example, law enforcement mechanisms often attempt to reconcile Syrian migrant women with their abusers under the bias that male violence is simply a part of their culture. Additionally, many migrant women refrain from applying for protection due to fear of deportation. For undocumented migrant women, these structural fears can be further exacerbated. 

Cumulatively, these realities erode trust in the legal system and actively enable male violence. It highlights the necessity of protections once guaranteed by the Istanbul Convention, both on a theoretical and a practical level.

Women holding a sign that says, “Perpetrators of Narin are those who withdrew from the Istanbul Convention,” protesting the murder of 8-year-old Narin Güran by the men in her family. [Image credit: Kadir Yesilbudak on Pexels]

“Protect Women, Children, and Animals”

The escalation of gender-based violence against women and LGBTIQ+ individuals does not occur in a vacuum. On the contrary, it is deeply intertwined with the broader erosion of human rights. Male violence against women functions as a primary instrument for reinforcing patriarchal control. By weaponizing sexual violence and gender-based abuse, the system fosters an atmosphere of fear that restricts autonomy, mobility, and opportunities. Consequently, this dynamic goes beyond merely subordinating women and LGBTIQ+ individuals to men. It elevates the patriarchal male to a position of supremacy against any other social group. In such environments, the reach of systemic male violence extends to children, migrants, disabled persons, and even animals. The violence is further legitimized when legal frameworks fail to provide substantive protection. 

In Turkiye, the consequences of male violence, which is enabled by the lack of legal protections provided to women, continue to victimize various other groups within society. For example, in recent years, the surge in cases of child abuse and violence against children has drawn significant attention. According to media reports, in 2024, men killed at least 43 children as a means to inflict harm on the women targeted by their abuse, compared to 28 reported cases in 2023, 39 in 2022, and 34 in 2020. The actual rates are believed to be substantially higher due to widespread underreporting of domestic violence and normalization of violence other than sexual. 

Additionally, there has been an increase in cases of violence against animals, including torture or cruel treatment, poisoning, and shootings. The Turkish Medical Association states there is a strong correlation between animal abuse and interpersonal violence. Research confirms that individuals who abuse animals frequently escalate to perpetrating violence against humans, and conversely, those who inflict violence on humans often abuse animals as well. Both patriarchy and animal abuse are fueled by a common desire to exert power and control over those perceived as weak and vulnerable. Moreover, despite statutory provisions within the Turkish Animal Protection Law that mandate punishment up to prison sentences for animal abuse, they remain unenforced. 

No instance of violence occurs in isolation, and they should be handled as such. All forms of violence, including against women, children, and even animals, are enabled by impunity, patriarchy, and toxic understandings of masculinities. In Turkiye, this crisis triggered protests under the slogan: “Protect women, children, and animals.”

Conclusion

The policies of the Turkish state systematically attempt to shift gender equality away from the sphere of human rights and onto an ideological one. Consequently, women who do not conform to the so-called “traditional family structure” are deemed unworthy of legal protection by the state. The Istanbul Convention addresses these institutional shortcomings by incorporating comprehensive strategies to combat gender-based violence for all women. The monitoring mechanism provides additional checks to evaluate state compliance. Therefore, its simultaneous enforcement with other international human rights treaties remains critical. 

Turkiye is the first country to sign and then withdraw from the Convention, bypassing public will and violating domestic law. Despite assurances from the government that women’s safety will not be compromised, the subsequent five years present a contradictory picture. Policies aimed to erase women from public spaces, while recognizing them solely through their familial roles. The unwillingness to achieve gender equality resulted in a severe increase in gender-based violence and femicides. 

Gender-based violence is by no means an isolated issue. The judicial impunity granted to perpetrators of male violence reflects a wider retrogression of human rights. Within the context of Türkiye, this regressive trend has compromised the welfare and rights of many social groups, including children, migrants, and animals. 

The Istanbul Convention shares fundamental values with United Nations treaties and the regional European Convention on Human Rights. Therefore, other instruments like CEDAW remain available to women in Turkiye. However, the state’s attempt to justify abandoning the Convention by stating that it contradicts traditional values raises questions regarding Turkiye’s commitment to its remaining international obligations. 

Turkiye’s withdrawal sets a concerning precedent. A state is openly defying the very human rights convention it pioneered, attempting to dismantle hard-won rights achieved through feminist struggle. Fundamental human rights must remain independent of state ideology. For this reason, the international community must stand together with women in Turkiye. To reverse the regression, Turkiye must urgently re-sign the Istanbul Convention and launch comprehensive and effective initiatives to eliminate violence. 

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Glossary

• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW): An international convention adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979. CEDAW is one of the most widely signed and ratified conventions that focuses on women. 

• Council of Europe: European Court of Human Rights: A regional human rights organization that promotes democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. It centers on the European Convention on Human Rights.

• Federation of the Women's Associations: Founded in 1976 to foster social and spiritual advancement by empowering women and promoting solidarity. Working areas include gender-based violence against women, girls, and LGBTIQ+ individuals. They adopt a human rights-based perspective.

• Femicide: Intentional gender-related killings of women. It is a global and systemic issue, enabled by discrimination, patriarchy, and harmful gender stereotypes.

• Gender-based violence: Violence that is directed against a person based on their gender, or that affects persons of a particular gender disproportionately.

• Gezi Park Protests: Started on May 30, 2013, as a criticism of the destruction of a park in central Istanbul, called the Gezi Park. Upon the police’s violent response, including tear gas, beatings, and burning the demonstrators’ tents, the protests spread to almost every province. 

• Hegemonic Masculinity: An idealized form of manhood that legitimizes the subordination of all other genders and marginalized non-conforming men.

• Intersectionality: A combination of multiple aspects of a person’s identity that might result in heightened discrimination or risk. 

• Law No. 6284: Turkiye’s law on the Protection of the Family and Prevention of Violence Against Women that aims to provide measures against domestic violence against women.. It was enacted on March 8, 2012, in relation to the Istanbul Convention. 

• LGBTIQ+: Acronym stands for individuals with diverse sexual orientation, gender identity, and non-conforming gender expressions, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer individuals, among others.

• Male Violence: Systemic violence originating from men. It is a structural tool used within patriarchal societies to enforce dominance over women, children, and marginalized groups. 

• Omnibus Reform Law: It allows the lawmakers to introduce, amend, or repeal regulations across a variety of unrelated areas in a single vote.

• Patriarchy: A structural social system in which men who conform to certain criteria hold primary power.

• United Nations: An international organization established to maintain international peace and promote human rights. Within international law, UN Treaties serve as a global framework. Under this framework, core human rights instruments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), are adopted.