Our response to Government’s fourth report on progress towards ratification
In October, the UK Government published its fourth report on progress towards ratification of the Istanbul Convention. Victoria Atkins MP, the Minister for Women, told parliament that this signalled the government’s ‘strong commitment to tackling violence against women and girls (VAWG)’, and that it remained ‘committed to ratifying it as soon as we possibly can’.
As promising as it sounds, this is what we have been hearing from successive governments over the last eight years.
So what’s the hold up?
In short, the UK government believes it should be compliant with every aspect of the Istanbul Convention before it ratifies it. To achieve this, governments since 2012 have introduced a range of new laws and strategies, covering crimes like forced marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and protective tools and powers to combat stalking and other forms of violence.
Most recently, through the 2020 Domestic Abuse Bill, the government is set to extend extra-territorial jurisdiction (ETJ) over certain crimes, such as rape involving adults. This means that UK nationals and residents who commit these violent and sexual offences outside the UK can now be brought to trial in the UK. For a long time, the government told us this was the last piece of the legislative jigsaw that needed to be in place before ratification.
However, it now sounds like it has found yet more missing pieces.
The government’s 2020 progress report rightly points out that it is not doing enough to support migrant women. This is an issue that organisations such as the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS), Southall Black Sisters, and many others have been raising for some time, including through the #StepUpMigrantWomen campaign.
It is encouraging that the government is taking notice of how its policies fail some of the most at-risk women – and we certainly think that these gaps must be addressed. However, this should not be a barrier to ratifying the Istanbul Convention. In fact, this is why we need the Convention ratified now: so that we can use it as a legal tool to hold the government to account. Instead, the government says we have to wait for more evidence.
We have waited long enough.
The Istanbul Convention is not a trophy – it is a strategy for ending violence against women and girls. It sets out a path to follow and ways to measure progress towards ensuring all women can live free from violence, and free from the fear of violence.
There is no requirement in the Convention, or indeed in any of its accompanying mechanisms, for a country to be fully compliant before ratification. As a matter of fact, other countries have ratified with the intention of using it as a roadmap to make life safer for women. Until our government does the same, the Convention does not have the same power to hold them accountable to a higher standard.
In fact, without it, we can see signs that we might fall further behind. We see this, for example, in recent proposals to divide domestic abuse from wider violence against women and girls (VAWG) policy, despite the Convention’s stipulating a coordinated and holistic approach. This move is inconsistent with the evidence about the nature of violence against women, and it risks increasingly sidelining and siloing policy and funding for specialist VAWG services, including those for disabled women, Black women and other women of colour.
We are deeply concerned that, instead of dealing properly with the flaws in our system that leave certain groups of women behind, the government is using important issues like these to kick ratification into the long grass.
We worked hard to get ratification back on the government’s agenda; it seems that they are still not listening. Meanwhile, and in such harrowing times, women are losing out.
[Photo: Egg timer on a beach by Aron Visuals, via Unsplash.]