No way to treat a treaty
The Istanbul Convention, which Poland ratified in 2015 and has now been signed and/or ratified by 45 countries but not yet ratified by the EU, attributes violence against women to the historical inequality between men and women, and defines gender as “socially constructed roles”.
For these reasons, ultra-conservatives in Poland and across Central and Southeast Europe have, for years, been railing against the document, which they argue will destroy the “traditional family” (ie. heterosexual married couples with children) by imposing so-called “gender ideology” – an umbrella term created by these groups which seems to refer primarily to LGBT and reproductive rights.
Last year, Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, a hardline Catholic whose United Poland party is a junior member of the Law and Justice-led (PiS) government, filed an official request with the Ministry for Family, Work and Social Policy asking it to initiate proceedings for withdrawing the country from the Istanbul Convention, which he argued was damaging to the family and Polish culture.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, despite publicly criticising the Istanbul Convention, in the end decided to park the issue by asking in July the PiS-controlled Constitutional Tribunal to assess the legality of the Istanbul Convention. The court hasn’t yet issued any ruling.
Given the indecision in the governing camp, hardliners saw the citizens’ initiative before parliament as a way to speed things up. According to the Polish Constitution, the president is in charge of carrying out withdrawals from international treaties, for which he needs the approval of parliament.
The draft law asks President Andrzej Duda to withdraw Poland from the Istanbul Convention and establish an advisory body that, over the next three years, would begin a long and extensive process to “develop the basic principles of an international convention on the rights of family” to replace the Istanbul Convention.
However, as can be seen from the letter already sent to conservative governments in the region, the Polish government has already come up with the basic tenets of the alternative convention, seemingly based in part on the draft family rights convention created by Ordo Iuris and the Christian Social Congress that has been in the public domain for about two years.
Representatives of Ordo Iuris and the Christian Social Congress interviewed by BIRN claimed that the Ordo Iuris version has been received with interest by members of the governments of Hungary and Slovakia.
Both the ministerial letter and the Ordo Iuris draft describe a situation where families are “under threat” and need extra protection. Both documents also reject the idea that the main cause of domestic violence is structural inequality between men and women, the premise of the Istanbul Convention.
Instead, the ministerial letter reads: “One of the main contemporary threats to the family is domestic violence caused by pathological factors, such as alcohol and drug abuse, sex addiction or omnipresent vulgarisation and sexualisation of the image of women in mass media.”
Similarly, an Ordo Iuris representative stated in an interview with BIRN about their draft that the causes of violence are not structural, but “pathologies”, which include alcoholism, pornography, social atomisation, the breakdown of family ties and the sexualisation of women in the public space.
When it comes to recommended actions to protect the family, the ministerial letter largely follows the line of the Ordo Iuris draft, while tightening the language and leaving some principles vaguer: it highlights the autonomy of the family in relation to the state, including when it comes to decisions about education; lists a series of “family rights” including “freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of speech, economic freedom, undistorted use of private property, and the right to the protection of private and family life”; then moves on to children’s rights, insisting the “child” has rights from conception; and then proposes civil and criminal remedies states could use to ensure those rights are respected.
Interestingly, in this latter section, the ministerial letter introduces the concept of “crimes against family”. While examples of such crimes in the letter include physical and psychological violence, sexual violence or forced marriage, the text specifies the list is not exhaustive – begging the question of whether actions like abortion or gay marriage might be added at a later stage.
