Five Years Without the Istanbul Convention: PACE Calls Turkey Back, 429 Femicides Mark the Anniversary

Executive summary

Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence — known internationally as the Istanbul Convention — on March 20, 2021. The withdrawal took effect on July 1, 2021. Turkey remains the only country to have ever withdrawn from the treaty, which it had been the first to ratify. Five years later, on April 22, 2026, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution formally urging Turkey to rejoin the Convention. The resolution arrives against a documented femicide record in Turkey: 429 women killed in 2024 in media-reported cases, the highest annual rate since 2010. This post lays out what the Convention required, what its withdrawal removed, and what the human cost has been.

What the Istanbul Convention required

The Istanbul Convention is the most comprehensive international treaty on violence against women. Drafted under Council of Europe auspices and opened for signature in Istanbul in 2011, it commits signatory states to:

• Prevention: education, awareness campaigns, training of frontline professionals (police, healthcare, judiciary)
• Protection: shelters, hotlines, emergency barring orders, restraining orders with criminal teeth
• Prosecution: criminalization of domestic violence, sexual violence, stalking, forced marriage, and so-called “honor”-based crimes; investigation and prosecution standards that take victim safety seriously
• Integrated policies: a coordinated response across government agencies rather than fragmented per-incident handling
• Monitoring: an independent expert body (GREVIO) that evaluates each state party’s implementation

Turkey’s ratification of the Convention in 2012 had been a landmark moment in Turkish women’s-rights advocacy. Domestic Law No. 6284 — Turkey’s primary domestic-violence statute — was substantially shaped by the Convention’s standards.

What withdrawal changed

Withdrawing from the Convention did not, on its own, repeal Turkey’s domestic Law No. 6284. The statute remains on the books. But three things did change, and they have proven consequential:

1. The international monitoring framework was lost. GREVIO no longer evaluates Turkey. The country is no longer subject to the periodic compliance review process that produces public reports on shelter capacity, prosecution rates, and protective-order effectiveness. The single most important external accountability mechanism on women’s safety in Turkey is gone.
2. The political signal it sent. The Turkish government’s stated rationale for withdrawal — that the Convention “normalized homosexuality” and was “incompatible with Turkey’s social and family values” — became a public-policy posture. Public officials, prosecutors, judges, and police were reading the same signal at the same moment: that protections for women under Law No. 6284 were no longer politically prioritized.
3. The downstream effect on Law No. 6284 enforcement. Multiple reports from the UK Home Office, the International Commission of Jurists, and Turkish women’s-rights NGOs document that protective orders under Law No. 6284 have since become harder to obtain, more frequently delayed, and less consistently enforced. The statute exists; the enforcement environment around it deteriorated.

The femicide record

The most-cited figure for 2024 is 429 women killed in femicides reported by Turkish media — compiled by the We Will Stop Femicide Platform (Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu), the leading Turkish NGO tracking the crisis. That figure is widely understood to undercount the actual rate, because:

• The platform records only cases reported in the press.
• Suspicious deaths classified as suicide are not counted, and women’s-rights advocates argue many should be re-investigated.
• Killings of trans women are often miscategorized in police records.

UN agencies, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, and a long list of independent monitors have flagged the same data: femicide rates in Turkey have risen, not fallen, since the Convention’s withdrawal took effect.

The PACE resolution of April 22, 2026 frames the consequence directly: women in Turkey “are being left without key protections,” and gender-based violence “remains widespread and underreported.”

Why withdrawal happened

The proximate cause of the March 2021 withdrawal was a presidential decree — issued, notably, by decree, without parliamentary approval. The decree’s legal basis was contested at the time and remains contested by Turkish constitutional scholars who argue that international human-rights treaties require legislative concurrence to be denounced.

The political backdrop is more useful than the legal pretext. Through 2018–2021, conservative coalition partners and religious-affairs constituencies had argued that the Convention’s framing — particularly its definition of gender, its non-discrimination provisions, and its protections that apply regardless of sexual orientation — was being used to advance positions inconsistent with traditional family policy. The withdrawal was the product of that internal political pressure, not of any documented harm caused by the Convention to Turkish institutions.

International observers, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, characterized the withdrawal at the time as a “worrying step backwards.” That language has held up.

What the April 22, 2026 PACE resolution actually says

PACE Resolution 2026/2649 does several specific things:

• Formally urges Turkey to rejoin the Convention without precondition.
• Documents the femicide trend since 2021, with reference to NGO data.
• Highlights the structural gap left by GREVIO’s exit from the country.
• Calls on Council of Europe member states to maintain bilateral pressure on Ankara on this specific issue.
• Recommends that the EU’s accession framework with Turkey treat re-accession to the Convention as a baseline expectation, not a negotiable item.

The resolution is not legally binding. But PACE resolutions have historically functioned as the political precursor to bilateral pressure from individual European foreign ministries, and they shape the framework against which Turkey’s EU candidacy is evaluated.

The asks from the women’s-rights movement in Turkey

Turkish women’s-rights organizations — including the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, Mor Çatı, and the Federation of Women’s Associations of Turkey — have consolidated their demands around five specific points:

1. Re-accession to the Istanbul Convention.
2. Restoration of GREVIO monitoring as a confidence-building precondition for re-accession.
3. Independent investigation of suspicious deaths of women currently classified as suicides.
4. Restoration of full enforcement of Law No. 6284, with documented training of police and judicial officers.
5. Protection of women’s-rights organizations themselves, several of which have been raided, prosecuted, or had their leadership detained over the past four years.

The fifth point connects to AST’s broader civil-society reporting: the same prosecutorial machinery used against journalists and lawyers has been used against women’s-rights advocacy organizations, particularly those whose work touches on Kurdish women, refugee women, or LGBTQ+ communities.

The legal status of withdrawal

A separate strand of legal advocacy continues to challenge the constitutional validity of the 2021 withdrawal itself. The argument: a treaty ratified with parliamentary approval cannot be denounced by presidential decree alone. Multiple cases brought before Turkey’s Constitutional Court on this question were dismissed on procedural grounds in 2021–22. A reframed challenge is reportedly under preparation, building on the 2025–26 ECtHR jurisprudence that has consistently flagged Turkey’s Constitutional Court for failing to provide effective oversight (see related AST analysis on ECHR rulings).

What this means for AST’s audience

Five things to take from the anniversary moment:

• The data is unambiguous. 429 femicides in 2024 — the highest annual rate since 2010 — is the cost of the policy choice made in March 2021.
• The international system has not given up. The April 22, 2026 PACE resolution shows that European institutions continue to treat re-accession as a live ask, not a closed file.
• Turkish women’s-rights organizations remain operating despite material pressure. They are the most-credible domestic source for case documentation.
• The legal challenge to the withdrawal continues. Constitutional law is not exhausted as a strategy.
• Cross-issue reporting matters. Femicide is connected to broader judicial dysfunction, to civil-society persecution, and to the same enforcement environment AST documents in other domains.

How to act on this

• Cite the 429 figure — and the source (We Will Stop Femicide Platform) — in any policy discussion of Turkey’s withdrawal.
• Reference the April 22, 2026 PACE resolution when corresponding with elected officials in Council of Europe member states.
• Support the named Turkish women’s-rights NGOs directly. Several have publicly available donation infrastructure.
• Watch for the renewed Constitutional Court challenge — it will likely produce a document trail that policy advocates can cite.

The Istanbul Convention was named for the city that hosted its drafting. Five years after Turkey’s withdrawal, the city is still where most of the international advocacy on the Convention’s future is centered. AST’s role is to make sure that advocacy stays grounded in the specific names, the specific cases, and the specific numbers — not in slogans.

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Sources: Turkish Minute, “PACE urges Turkey to rejoin Istanbul Convention, cites ongoing violence against women” (April 29, 2026); UN Western Europe, “Turkey’s withdrawal from women’s protection treaty, ‘worrying step backwards'”; International Commission of Jurists, “Turkey’s withdrawal from Istanbul Convention a setback for women and girls’ human rights”; UK Home Office Country Policy and Information Note on Turkey (July 2025); We Will Stop Femicide Platform annual data; Wikipedia, “Istanbul Convention” (consolidated).