Turkey, which withdrew from the 2011 “Istanbul Convention” on the criminalization of violence against women earlier in the year, has faced renewed pressure from women’s rights groups to return to the agreement after the brazen public murder of a Turkish woman.

Architect Basak Cengiz, 28, a native of Ankara, was killed on November 9 on a public street in Istanbul. The suspected killer, taken into custody immediately after the murder, told police that he had wanted to kill someone and had “picked a woman because [he] thought it would be easier.”

The murder has prompted an outcry across Turkey, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has visited the Cengiz family to offer his condolences. However, the president’s critics have highlighted his unprompted decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention in March as an unforced error that could lead to further violence against women in the months ahead.

On March 20, Erdogan withdrew Turkey from the agreement by presidential decree, claiming that it had been used to “normalize homosexuality” within Turkey. Erdogan claimed that the agreement was, therefore, “incompatible with Turkey’s social and family values.” He has since fended off accusations of discrimination, claiming that existing Turkish laws adequately criminalize violence against women without the need for the rules stipulated in the convention.

However, since Ankara’s withdrawal from the convention, domestic violence and femicide in Turkey have each increased. According to We Will Stop Femicide, a Turkish NGO tracking violence against women, 285 women have been murdered in the country so far in 2021, placing the country on track to exceed the 300 who were murdered in 2020. Of these, in most of the cases that resulted in an arrest, the husband was the primary suspect. The group has claimed that calls to its hotline have increased threefold since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Turkey’s decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention is particularly noteworthy because, as host to the convention that drafted the agreement, Turkey was the first country to sign it. The social reforms that led to the document’s adoption were largely brought about by Erdogan himself, in his earlier role as the country’s Prime Minister.

Representatives of Turkey’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), the country’s largest opposition party, have indicated that they will immediately rejoin the agreement if elected.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters