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The Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women (Istanbul Convention) – recent developments on the setting-up of the monitoring mechanism

Only a few years ago, its adoption was considered a challenge. Different cultures and diverse legal systems, difficulties to protect women and punish perpetrators, insufficient services for assisting women, lack of political will, may have easily been presented as obstacles to the adoption of the Convention. But today the Convention is here, and it is a success story.

Now that it is in force, we face an ever greater challenge: its effective implementation. For this purpose, a state-of-the-art monitoring mechanism is being established. It has an independent expert component - the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO) - and a political component - the Committee of the Parties.

On 4 May, I had the great pleasure of opening the first meeting of the Committee of the Parties. This Committee – now chaired by Ambassador Erdoğan Işcan, Permanent Representative of Turkey to the Council of Europe – elected the first ten members of GREVIO.

The Committee of the Parties also reflected on better interaction with the Parliamentary Assembly when following up on future GREVIO’s findings. This is particularly relevant as the Istanbul Convention expressly foresees a regular monitoring parliamentary dimension to the implementation of the Convention.

GREVIO will be the driving force of the Istanbul Convention monitoring mechanism. Many challenges await this new expert group in the years to come, and one of these challenges is precisely our reason for pride: the comprehensiveness of the Istanbul Convention. It requires countries to take measures that prevent violence against women, protect victims, and prosecute perpetrators.

The newly elected GREVIO members are highly qualified experts, coming from diverse professional backgrounds: they are current or former judges, prosecutors, academics, social workers, directors of shelters for victims of violence or health-care professionals.

Their multidisciplinary expertise will be key in making the group’s future monitoring work effective. We are in good hands. The election of the five remaining members after the 25th ratification of the Convention will provide an opportunity to bring further expertise.

GREVIO will hold its first meeting on 21-23 September, here in Strasbourg, and expectations are high. Its members’ first priority will most likely be to decide how best to evaluate actual progress and shortcomings in states parties to the Convention. How to ensure not just formal compliance with the Convention’s provisions, but also their effectiveness in practice; how to obtain as much information as possible, bearing in mind resources constraints and avoiding the so-called “monitoring fatigue” that may exist in countries; how to involve as many relevant stakeholders as possible in the monitoring process, without making it unmanageable: these are some of the challenges that GREVIO members may have to discuss and overcome. We count on your continuous input to make the monitoring process a success.