In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women, known as the Istanbul Convention, which requires authorities to investigate and punish such crimes.
Turkey recorded seven femicides in the same day, perpetrated by current or former partners.
“In total, seven women were savagely murdered in Izmir, Bursa, Sakarya, Erzurum, Denizli, and Istanbul,” stated the private TV channel Haber Türk, cited by the AFP news agency.
“The suspects were their current partners or partners from whom they had separated,” the channel added, which mentions the victims’ names and publishes their images on its website.
The women, aged between 32 and 49, were killed by gunfire or with a sharp weapon. Three of the assailants committed suicide, and two were arrested, while another died after being injured during the arrest.
The fate of the seventh, who escaped from prison to murder his wife, was not specified.
In 2023, the women’s rights platform “We will stop femicides” recorded 315 women murdered in Turkey, with 65% of them occurring in homes. It also counted 248 “suspicious deaths,” classified as “suicides” by the authorities, but feminists attribute them to a third party and highlight the suspicious increase in defenestrations (thrown from a height) in the country.
In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women, known as the Istanbul Convention, which requires authorities to investigate and punish such crimes.
NGOs point out that “in fifteen years, the only year in which the number of femicides decreased was in 2011 when the Istanbul Convention was adopted”.
“We will stop femicides” platform faced legal proceedings in 2022 initiated by an Istanbul prosecutor seeking to ban it for “immoral activities,” but the case was eventually closed.
