TURKEY: The Istanbul Convention under attack

Turkey’s authoritarian government proclaimed its intention to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention. Back in 2012, Turkey had been the first country to ratify the Convention, but as the ruling party moved to shore up its socially conservative support base it rejected it on the grounds that it was antithetical to ‘Turkish family values’. As in Poland, the main objection against the Convention was that it was an expression of so-called ‘gender ideology’, a myth used by anti-rights forces to characterise women’s and LGBTQI+ rights as a foreign imposition and smear rights activists as agents of foreign interests.