Nobody envies Turkey this top position: Of all the countries of the Council of Europe that signed the Convention for the Protection of Women from Violence in Istanbul in 2011, no other country recorded more murders of women than the country in which the agreement was signed ten years ago had been brought.

In the past year alone, 408 women were killed by their partners or a family member in Turkey, and 171 more were found dead under suspicious circumstances.

Rainer Hermann

Editor in politics.

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Nevertheless, Family Minister Zehra Zümrüt Selcuk insists that Turkey can protect women with “its own laws, its constitution and a dynamic judiciary”.

The minister wants to calm the mind with it.

Because President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered Turkey to leave the Istanbul Convention by decree on Saturday night.

Erdogan's turnaround is an example of how much Turkey has changed over the past decade.

At first Erdogan was the first to sign the convention, and a campaign he launched had promoted the content of the convention among the population.

But now Turkey is the first country to leave the convention.

And that without consulting parliament, Justice Minister Abdülhamit Gül criticized at the weekend.

Erdogan's daughter stops discussion

But the word from Fuat Oktay, Erdogan's deputy as president, weighs more heavily.

He shared on Twitter that Turkey does not have to imitate others.

After all, the solution to the protection of women's rights lies “in our own customs and traditions”.

The convention, which Erdogan co-signed and has now revoked, states that religion, traditions and terms such as “honor” cannot be used to justify acts of violence under any circumstances.

Erdogan's approach is apparently not undisputed in his family.

Last year, it was his daughter, Sümeyya, who stopped a discussion that radical Islamists had started about leaving the convention.

She had reacted to hateful insults by the Islamist media against women who defended the convention.

Threat of going to court

In the past few weeks, however, the president's power calculation has prevailed again. He met with representatives of the Islamist Saadet party, a small splinter party that has always called for withdrawal from the convention. She is in opposition to Erdogan's rule because she is not Islamist enough for her; But Erdogan needs them if he wants to win future elections. Mehmet Boynukal, the imam and chief preacher of Hagia Sophia, which was newly used as a mosque, reiterated the mood of these circles, who announced that men have the right to treat women and the whole family “according to the rules of Islam”.

The well-known lawyer Kezban Hatemi therefore fears that the change in civil law, which stipulates the equality of men and women, could become the next milestone on the way back.

What is currently being done is nothing less than promoting violence against women, fears the chairwoman of the Federation of Women’s Associations of Turkey, Canan Güllü.

They receive support from the Turkish opposition parties.

CHP chairman Kemal Kilicdaroglu wrote to Erdogan on Twitter: “You cannot revoke 42 million women of their rights overnight by decree.” Now Erdogan is personally responsible for all violence against women and girls and is therefore a “national security problem ".

Kilicdaroglu wants to bring the case to the State Council, Turkey's highest court.

HDP politician arrested

The MP Mustafa Yeneroglu, who left Erdogan's AKP two years ago and joined the party of former Minister of Economics Ali Babacan, accuses Erdogan of having taken the path of calculated social division. With this show of force he is preparing a culture war, said Yeneroglu.

Unlike Yeneroglu, the Kurdish MP Ömer Faruk Gergerlioglu was never a member of Erdogan's AKP. But for many years he supported Erdogan until he was elected as a member of parliament for the HDP. In the past week, the majority of the AKP and MHP withdrew his immunity. On Sunday morning, when Gergerlioglu was performing the prayer, the police took him out of the parliament building. His undaunted human rights activism, with which he has drawn a lot of attention, was his undoing. It was he who uncovered arbitrary searches of completely undressed women in police custody and pre-trial detention.