On 18 March 2021, the action “Raising awareness of the Istanbul Convention and other gender equality standards in Azerbaijan” launched a series of webinars dedicated to explaining specific articles of the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention) in Azerbaijan.

The aim of these series of webinars is to contribute to the debate at national level on why Azerbaijan should join the convention and to show what the convention says. The first webinar was centred around Article 12 of the Istanbul Convention on general state obligations on preventing violence against women.

Civil society, state authorities, students, journalists, social workers, legal professionals, healthcare works, teachers, etc participated in the webinar. The meeting had a very active Q&A session, during which participants raised important issues such as how to identify cases of violence against women, what actions are needed at local level, or how to make sure violence against women is considered a public matter.

The next webinars in 2021 will focus on the following topics:

• Raising Awareness on Violence Against Women: Article 13 of the Istanbul Convention
• Domestic and Sexual Violence Perpetrator Programmes: Article 16 of the Istanbul Convention
• Emergency Barring Orders in Situations of Domestic Violence: Article 52 of the Istanbul Convention

This activity took place under the joint action “Raising awareness of the Istanbul Convention and other gender equality standards in Azerbaijan” currently implemented within the Programme for Good Governance II (PGGII), a European Union and Council of Europe joint programme in the Eastern Partnership countries. Among other objectives, the joint action seeks to support the Azerbaijani authorities to sign the Istanbul Convention.

For further information on the project, please see the project’s website.

For further information on PGGII, please see PGGII’s website.