Turkey Exits Convention Against Misogynistic Violence, Saying It 'Normalizes Homosexuality'

Turkey announced it has jumped ship on the Istanbul Convention, an agreement among nations designed to "combat and prevent domestic violence against women," Amnesty International said in a release.

The reason offered for the move, which was undertaken by way of an executive order from Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan, scapegoated the country's LGTB. According to Directorate of Communications, Erdogan escaped the convention because it "normalizes homosexuality" - which was said to be "incompatible" with Turkish "social and family values."

This happened even as violence against women seemed to be soaring in Turkey. The BBC reports that, "According to Turkey's We Will Stop Femicide Platform, at least 300 women were murdered in the country last year, but the number could be even greater, with dozens more found dead in suspicious circumstances."

BBC noted the convention, which was signed 10 years ago in Istanbul, was "the world's first binding treaty to prevent domestic violence," and said that Erdogan's having yanked Turkey out of the pact "was described as 'devastating' for efforts to combat domestic violence by the head of Europe's top human rights body, the Council of Europe."

The BBC noted that among episodes of violence directed at women and girls in recent years was the 2018 rape and murder of a young woman named Sule Cet in Ankara, Turkey's capital. The perpetrators threw her body from the window of a high-rise building, the BBC recalled, "trying to disguise their crime as a suicide."

That brutal act triggered "demonstrations," the BBC said, as has Erdogan's executive order pulling Turkey out of the accord.

Pink News noted that move, "thousands of people stormed the streets of Istanbul, urging Erdogan to reconsider his overnight decree annulling Turkey's ratification of the convention."

The demonstrations, Pink News noted, were similar to those that took place last year after the idea was first proposed Turkey disengage from the convention.

Pink News called the move, and its scapegoating of sexual minorities, "the latest example of the growing hostility Turkey's leaders have shown towards LGBT people, as a hatred that once festered has been allowed to become the norm."