Turkey’s Constitutional Court has found no violation of rights in the application of a woman and a women’s association that challenged Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, an international accord designed to protect women’s rights and prevent domestic violence, the Kısa Dalga news website reported on Wednesday.
On March 20, 2021 President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a decree withdrawing Turkey from the Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, better known as the Istanbul Convention.
The Turkish government’s move sparked outrage at home and was met with criticism from several countries, international organizations and rights groups.
Turkey was the first country to sign the convention in 2011 and ratified it by a vote in parliament the following year.
The individual application, submitted by lawyer Oya Aydın Göktaş on behalf of Şenal Sarıhan and the 29th October Women’s Association, contested the presidential decree, arguing that it violated several constitutional rights, including the rights to respect for private and family life, fair trial, effective legal remedies and the principle of equality.
The court, however, found no rights violation in the case, ruling it “inadmissible” because neither Sarıhan nor the association demonstrated that they were “personally and directly affected” by the withdrawal.
“To submit an individual application to the Constitutional Court, the applicant must demonstrate that they are personally and directly affected by the public action or decision that allegedly caused the violation. In this case, the court concluded that there was no personal and direct impact from the public action or decision in question,” the top court said.
Göktaş told Kısa Dalga that the Constitutional Court’s failure to recognize Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention as a violation of rights and a source of harm for all women living in the country “cannot be justified through legal reasoning.”
“As a human rights defender, lawyer and woman, my client Şenal Sarıhan, like millions of women in this country, has been deprived of the protection of the convention,” the lawyer added.
Göktaş said the Constitutional Court is obligated to strictly follow the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), adding that she will take the case to the Strasbourg court.
Sarıhan and the association’s individual application to the Constitutional Court followed the rejection of their appeal by the Council of State, Turkey’s highest administrative court. The appeal sought to annul the presidential decree that pulled Turkey out of the convention.
Femicide and violence against women are chronic problems in Turkey, where women are killed, raped or beaten almost every day.
According to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, at least 193 women were murdered by men and an additional 149 women died under suspicious circumstances in the first half of 2024.
Many critics say the main reason behind the situation is the policies of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which protects violent and abusive men by granting them impunity.
Turkish courts have repeatedly attracted criticism due to their tendency to hand down lenient sentences to offenders, claiming that the crime was merely “motivated by passion” or by interpreting victims’ silence as consent.