With as many as 12% of Polish women being beaten by their male partners, in mid-March, the parliament conducted the first reading of a controversial bill that aims to withdraw Poland from the Istanbul Convention – an important instrument put in place by the United Nations and the Council of Europe (CE).
The bill was elaborated and proposed by the Polish far-right organization, Ordo Iuris, which claims that the Istanbul Convention must be withdrawn to protect Poland from ‘gender ideology’ by which the organization means gender equality and women rights, and the rights of LGBTQ. The bill is supported by the ruling party and its coalition members which have the majority in parliament. Meanwhile, the liberal and left-wing opposition is against the withdrawal.
Poland is not the only country intending to exit the treaty despite having ratified it. On March 20, Turkey’s President, Recep Yayyip Erdoğan, announced his decision to pull the country out of the treaty signed in Istanbul. A group of independent UN human rights experts called this decision “a very worrying step backwards.”
The intentions of the Polish legislators raise concerns. In 2020, the CE Secretary-General, Marija Pejčinović Burić, described as “regrettable” the plan of the Polish authorities to withdraw from the treaty: “Leaving the Istanbul Convention would be highly regrettable and a major step backwards in the protection of women against violence in Europe.” She also noted at that time that the Council was ready to clarify “in a constructive dialogue” the “misconceptions or misunderstandings about the convention”.
The Polish alt-right claims that those provisions are against the Catholic values they believe in and they propose to adopt their own bill instead which will ban abortion and same-sex marriages.
Violence against women is a serious problem in Poland. A local survey company, CBOS, estimated that in 2018, 12% of Polish women were beaten by their husbands or partners, while 22% of respondents declared that they personally knew women who had been beaten. In turn, as many as 24% of Poles (women and men) reported that they had been the victims of some type of violence in their relationship (psychical, sexual, economical). This data may not reflect the full extent of the problem, however, as many women, especially in the Polish countryside, do not report the violence, according to a source.
The Center of Women Rights (Centrum Praw Kobiet), an NGO dealing with violence against women, stresses that the statistics may be underestimated and it reveals other data, according to which as many as 400-500 Polish women are killed as a result of domestic violence every year. Moreover, the NGO claims that even if women do report the violence, the police and the prosecuting authorities do not take the problem seriously, treating domestic violence as a private, family issue, and therefore 50% of all reported cases are dismissed.
The Istanbul Convention was adopted in 2011 by the CE and aims to prevent and combat violence against women and domestic violence. It was signed and ratified by 34 European countries, including developing states. At the same time, while Armenia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Moldova, Slovakia, Ukraine, and the UK have signed the convention, they have yet to ratify it.
