Slovak parliament rejects women’s rights treaty

Slovakia’s parliament has rejected an international treaty on women’s rights, known as the Istanbul Convention, that was first adopted in 2011 by the Council of Europe and is based on the understanding that governments must fully address gender-based violence in all its forms and take measures to protect women from their abuses and to allow victims to prosecute the perpetrators.
96 of the 113 Slovak lawmakers who were present for the vote rejected the ratification of the treaty and called on President Zuzana Caputova to inform the Council of Europe that Slovakia has no intention of ratifying the Istanbul Convention.
The rejection of the bill was led by the Slovak National Party, an arch-conservative and nationalist party that is a member of a ruling coalition that is led by the leftist SMER party, which is led by former Prime Minister Robert Fico. The far-right People’s Party Our Slovakia also voted against it.
The critics of the Convention say that some of its provisions violate the Slovak Constitution, including the constitutional definition of marriage as a union of a man and a woman.
Although most European countries have signed the treaty, many in the former Soviet-led Eastern Bloc countries, including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, and Latvia, have all opted to reject the convention.
Slovakia’s centre-right opposition condemned the move as an act that caters to so-called “traditional values” populism that has been on the rise in Eastern Europe for the last several years.