On Turkey's withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention

Abstract

In this study, I inquire into the reasons for Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. I begin with a brief history of Turkey’s commitment to women’s rights and evaluate the “leading role” it played in creating the Istanbul Convention. I then discuss the legal objections made by women and human rights organizations that establish the illegality of the presidential decree to withdraw from the Convention in 2021. Explaining the difference between Law no 6284, which is still reinforced, after the Istanbul Convention is given up, I explore Turkey’s new gender politics focusing on protecting the family. I argue that the concern for the family took the form of war over gender with feminist politics. This decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention resulted from Erdoğan’s government’s perception of the contemporary feminist and LGBTI+ movement as threatening “Muslim cultural identity.” Since 2015, the state has systematically weakened, banned, and even criminalized feminist NGOs and organizations. The withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention is another step in the Turkish state’s war against the feminist and LGBTI+ movements. From the government’s perspective, the empowerment of women by the Convention undermines the family based on historically entrenched gender roles and increases divorce and violent conflict in the family. Turkish state also sees the LGBTI+ movement as a political threat against the family it wants to support and perpetuate. Reading the apologists’ texts for this policy, I argue that they over-interpret the term “sexual orientation” that belongs to the wording of the Istanbul Convention. Notwithstanding the Convention’s requirement that the state acknowledges and protects LGBTI+ rights as human rights, ideologists regard it as paving the way for a future commitment to making legal changes based on gender as self-id. They conceive this future as incompatible with Erdoğan’s identity politics of gender that depends on the binarity of sexes, which is unquestioningly associated with the conservation of the “cultural and religious family values.”