The Istanbul Convention is the first legally-binding instrument to create a comprehensive framework to counter violence against women and girls. It covers all forms of such violence and includes offences such as rape and stalking. It highlights the need for preventative measures, such as establishing refuge shelters, providing education on equality between men and women, criminalising forced and underage marriages, collecting data on prosecutions of gendered crime and promoting women’s economic and social independence.
The Convention was opened for signature in 2011 and, at the time of writing, it has been signed by 45 states and ratified by 34 of them. Yet although the UK has been a signatory since 2012, it has not ratified. Given the significant increase in concerns about violence against women in the UK this year, it is worth asking why the Istanbul Convention does not seem to be a priority for the government—and whether, 10 years since we signed up in principle, 2022 might be the year the UK finally commits to these international obligations.
After the UK signed the Convention, it quickly became apparent that our domestic laws were not in a fit state to fully meet its requirements. Since then, the UK has remained in a strange limbo, indicating that it wishes to accede to the Convention, but never quite managing to do so.
The death of Sarah Everard in March 2021 felt like a watershed moment. It is clear that violence against women and girls remains a serious problem in the UK. The 2019/20 Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that approximately 1.6m women aged between 16-74 had experienced domestic abuse in a single year. The BBC reported that in the year to March 2020, 207 women were killed in Great Britain and 57 per cent of these victims were killed by someone they knew, most commonly a male partner or ex-partner. The lockdowns imposed during pandemic are only likely to have made this situation worse.
The UK parliament has treated this issue seriously. The Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report in 2015 identifying several legal issues which needed to be resolved in order for the Convention to be ratified. These included criminalising psychological violence; ensuring extraterritorial jurisdiction, so that a UK national or resident could be prosecuted for certain offences (including murder, manslaughter, and offences relating to bodily harm or injury) committed outside the UK and providing support to victims with migrant status.
Yet, even by 2017, little had changed and parliamentarians from several parties combined to back a Private Members' Bill which required the government to make annual reports on progress towards ratification. This had only limited impact. Reports were published but, for several years, there was little evidence of any concrete progress in meeting the unresolved issues.
Eventually, the matter came to the fore during the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. The government indicated that it would make provision for extraterritorial jurisdiction and that separate legislation, before the Northern Ireland Assembly, would deal with the unresolved question of criminalising psychological violence in that jurisdiction.
This left open a final issue—providing support to migrant victims. This question was picked up by the House of Lords International Agreements Committee in February 2021. It held an evidence session with Victoria Atkins, then the Home Office minister with responsibility for preventing violence against women and girls.
It swiftly became evident that the government was unwilling to provide a clear commitment to ratify the Convention, even after the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act. Despite significant efforts in the Lords, amendments to support victims of domestic abuse regardless of their immigration status were resisted by the government, and the question of how to help all migrant victims of violence remained unresolved.
A debate over the government’s position in respect of the Convention was held in the House of Commons in May 2021. This position remains less than clear. During the passage of that Domestic Abuse Act, the government did commit to running a pilot scheme to support migrant victims. In April 2021, it announced a £1.5m grant for accommodation and wraparound support for migrant victims of domestic abuse who had no recourse to public funds.
However, in November 2021, the government acknowledged that it did not expect to receive a final report from this pilot scheme until June next year. This suggests that the UK remains unlikely to ratify the Convention in 2022, a decade after it was signed.
Given that migrant victims are particularly vulnerable, as they may face the risk of deportation when they report domestic abuse, it seems that protecting all women from violence is not the priority of the Home Office when such a policy might hinder immigration control. This is shameful and it appears that the department has failed to consider the impact of its hostile environment strategy on some of the most vulnerable people in society.
Providing migrant victims with support, even if this is only temporary, is the only way that the UK will be able to meet the obligations under the Convention. Clearly it is the right thing to do. The government’s approach is particularly regrettable because, in other respects, the UK does have better protections for women and girls than many other signatory states and so, if this issue could be resolved, we would have a comparably strong, though far from perfect, regime
The consequences of the UK’s continuing failure to ratify are profound. It undoubtedly hinders its ability to provide international leadership in this vital area—a point which was stressed by the International Agreements Committee.
This is important as several other signatory states have yet to ratify, and several more have now either indicated that they will not ratify, or subsequently announced that they will leave the Convention. In March, it was reported that Turkey had denounced the Convention, following the example of Poland, which announced that it would withdraw in 2020 (principally on the grounds that the Convention promoted an ideological agenda, including LGBT rights). The Convention has also been rejected in Bulgaria and Hungary.
As a matter of principle it is also simply inappropriate for the UK to sign a Convention and then leave it unratified for such an extended period.
The ratification of the Istanbul Convention is hardly a magic bullet which will resolve the problems we face in respect of these issues. Nonetheless, it would highlight the fact that the state has a positive duty in law to intervene in a practical way by combatting practices that result in harm, violence and degradation to women and girls.
It is frankly humiliating that, after nearly a decade, the government is still unwilling to provide such an assurance.
