Rejection or Intended Rejection of the Council of Europe's Istanbul Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence in 2019-2021, in the Name of Christian and Islamic Values

International audienceThe Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention) is an international treaty of the Council of Europe, committing the signatory states to the elimination of all forms of violence against women, including domestic violence. It was signed by the Ministers of Justice of the Member States at the beginning of 2011 in Istanbul. Yet, in the last few years, this Convention has been the object of an intense political debate in several European countries, and often in countries which are not completely open to religious freedom. The object of this debate was that national parliaments accept or refuse ratification of this Convention, signed by all the member states of the Council of Europe since 2011, except Russia (without much surprise) and Azerbaijan. At the end of this year, ten years later, 4 parliaments refused to ratify it, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria, while the last two countries have not yet ratified it, the United Kingdom and Ukraine, but have announced that they will do it soon. And one state, Turkey, among the first to have signed, ratified and implemented it, has withdrawn in March 2021. We will briefly present the history of this Convention and its provisions. Then we will explain why ten years later there are still some states that have not ratified the Convention, like Hungary, why some states ratified it after a long inner battle, like Croatia, or are threatening to leave it now, like Poland, or have left it like Turkey. The reason was similar: these countries are ruled by powerful parties or political majorities that call themselves Christian or Islamic, which say that this Convention was destroying traditional (Christian-Islamic) families and promoting gender theory and homosexuality instead