Ukrainian parliament ratifies Istanbul Convention on preventing violence against women

The Ukrainian parliament, Verkhovna Rada, ratified the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.

MP Yaroslav Zhelezniak and Andrii Osadchuk announced this.

Two hundred fifty-nine deputies voted for it; only eight were against it.

President Zelensky introduced a draft law to parliament to ratify the Convention on June 18.

At the end of January 2022, the second petition demanding ratification of the document received the required number of votes, and the President responded to it. Zelensky promised that after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs finalized several documents, the Verkhovna Rada would ratify the Convention.

We should note that according to the EP's sources, the requirement to ratify the Istanbul Convention has been voiced in private by some EU member states as a precondition for approving the candidate status for EU membership.

Reference

The Istanbul Convention is an international agreement of the Council of Europe, which as of January 2020, has been signed by more than 35 European Union countries. Ukraine was one of the authors of the Convention and one of the first to sign it (in 2011) but has not been able to ratify it for more than ten years.

The importance of the Convention is that it is the first international legally binding piece of legislation designed to protect women's rights worldwide and at all times, both in peacetime and during wars.

This document establishes criminal liability for violence against women. In several articles, its authors specify what forms of violence are involved: not only sexual and physical but also psychological, economic, forced marriage, forced abortion or sterilization, female genital mutilation, and "crimes committed in the name of so-called honor," and persecution.