Beyond Withdrawal: Economic Violence After Turkey Left the Istanbul Convention

[Dr Çiğdem İleri Köksal is a lawyer based in Hamburg and received her PhD from Bucerius Law School in Germany.

Dr. Işıl Kurnaz is a scholar in international human rights law based in Pisa and holds a PhD from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy.]

Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention by Presidential Decision published in the Official Gazette on 20 March 2021 generated an immediate debate about whether the country had created a legal vacuum in the protection of women against violence. That debate remains too narrow. In the specific context of economic violence, the more revealing question is not simply whether an international norm disappeared, but whether domestic institutions can still make this form of harm visible, actionable, and remediable once the Convention’s external monitoring and accountability framework is gone.

Economic violence is useful because it rarely appears as a single dramatic event. It is usually embedded in household control over income, barriers to paid work, maintenance defaults, housing precarity, and dependence on informal family networks. Those harms are legally cognizable, but difficult to identify and coordinate across agencies. Turkey therefore illustrates a broader international-law point: treaty withdrawal does not matter only because it removes a formal obligation; it also weakens the monitoring ecology that helps domestic systems prioritize, interpret, and implement protection norms.

The withdrawal must also be situated in its political and legal context. It followed a broader domestic controversy around family policy, gender, sexuality, sovereignty, and the legitimacy of external monitoring. Turkish officials and supporters of withdrawal argued, in substance, that domestic law was sufficient to protect women and that an international treaty framework was unnecessary or intrusive. This framing matters because withdrawal reallocated authority away from external accountability and back to domestic institutions whose capacity to implement protection norms was already contested.

Domestic Law Still Names Economic Violence

Article 3(b) of the Istanbul Convention expressly includes ‘economic violence’ within the definition of domestic violence. That conceptual move survives in Turkish domestic law. Law No. 6284 defines domestic violence to include physical, sexual, psychological, and economic violence, and it authorizes a range of protective and preventive measures intended to interrupt dependency and protect survivors. Those measures include shelter, temporary financial support, counselling, workplace relocation, address protection, and property or residence-related interventions. So the post-withdrawal problem is not that Turkish law has forgotten economic violence. It has not.  

The Turkish Constitutional Court’s leading judgment in K.Ş. reinforces that point. The Court found a violation where authorities failed to protect a woman attacked by her ex-husband and rejected her request for a workplace change. The decision confirms that violence against women engages the state’s positive obligations and that formal orders alone are insufficient if institutions fail to operationalize protection in practice.

Protection Fails in the Implementation Chain

A 2025 monitoring report on the implementation of Law No. 6284 reviewed 203 case files and found delayed implementation of protection orders, repeated breaches of restraining or no-contact orders, difficulties in obtaining accurate information, and weak follow-up after applications. The report also pointed to shallow risk analysis, inconsistent record-keeping, insufficient transparency in published data, and inadequate involvement of women’s organizations in policymaking. In other words, the institutions charged with making economic violence visible often do not function as a coherent protection system.

That implementation gap matters especially for economic violence because the relevant facts are dispersed across multiple legal and administrative sites. A survivor may need an urgent protection order under Law No. 6284, but also effective maintenance collection, rapid access to social assistance, safe housing, childcare, employment referral, and responsive local services. No single institution owns that entire chain. If police, family courts, social assistance bodies, shelters, Violence Prevention and Monitoring Centres (ŞÖNİM), and employment services do not communicate, economic violence remains legible only in fragments. 

That fragmentation also creates evidentiary problems. Physical assault often leaves visible traces. Economic violence often looks like ordinary household practice unless institutions are trained to ask the right questions: Who controls income? Who can work? Who can access housing, transport, childcare, or maintenance? When risk analysis is poor and administrative data is thin, invisibility itself becomes a mode of non-protection. Therefore the post-withdrawal debate should not be reduced to abstract questions about normative absence. The urgent issue is whether the state can still detect the harm it nominally prohibits. 

Withdrawal Matters Because Accountability Matters

This is where international law re-enters. The Istanbul Convention was never just a definitional instrument. It also established a monitoring architecture through GREVIO, periodic state reporting, civil-society input, and public evaluation. On the Council of Europe’s Turkey country page, one can see the baseline evaluation materials, the GREVIO baseline report, and the Committee of the Parties’ recommendation. Withdrawal removed Turkey from that accountability structure with effect from 1 July 2021. 

That loss matters even if Law No. 6284 remains in force. External monitoring does not merely duplicate domestic law; it affects how domestic actors understand urgency, what gets counted, what becomes politically salient, and what forms of under-enforcement become harder to deny. GREVIO’s existence created a forum in which data gaps, institutional shortcomings, and conceptual blind spots could be publicly assessed against a shared regional standard. Once that external frame disappears, non-implementation becomes easier to normalize as an internal administrative problem rather than a failure of international obligation. 

The post-withdrawal accountability landscape has therefore become more fragmented rather than entirely empty. Domestic courts, individual applications before the Constitutional Court, civil society monitoring, bar associations, women’s organisations, and independent implementation reports continue to generate forms of legal and political accountability. The K.Ş. judgment illustrates the continuing importance of constitutional adjudication for state responsibility in violence against women cases, while the 2025 monitoring report shows that civil society and practice-based review can still document failures in the implementation of Law No. 6284. The Foundation for Women’s Solidarity’s (Kadın Dayanışma Vakfı) 2025 monitoring of 203 case files found that protection orders are frequently short-term and inconsistently enforced, that violations rarely result in sanctions, and that ministries declined to provide disaggregated data when formally requested — responding instead that generating such detail would require separate research. Economic violence appeared in 122 of those files, the second most prevalent form after psychological violence, yet courts routinely focused only on the most recent incident rather than conducting comprehensive risk assessments, leaving perpetrators free to exercise financial control even where restraining orders nominally existed. Yet these mechanisms do not replicate the Convention’s external monitoring structure. GREVIO reporting created a periodic, public, and internationally comparable framework through which data gaps, institutional failures, and implementation problems could be assessed against a shared regional standard. Post-withdrawal accountability, by contrast, depends more heavily on domestic litigation, civil society mobilisation, and ad hoc monitoring. This makes the accountability landscape less systematic and more vulnerable to political and institutional neglect.

A recent illustration of this dynamic is the Constitutional Court’s majority decision to annul the provision stipulating indefinite payment of poverty maintenance (yoksulluk nafakası) to divorced spouses under Article 175 of the Turkish Civil Code — a decision whose grounds have yet to be published and which will enter into force in nine months. This matters for economic violence because poverty maintenance has long functioned as a post-divorce financial safeguard for women facing economic vulnerability after marital dissolution. The Foundation for Women’s Solidarity’s 2024 monitoring report on poverty maintenance had already documented that awarded amounts are consistently low, frequently unpaid, and that the debate over limiting maintenance gained institutional traction precisely after Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. The annulment thus illustrates how domestic financial protections may become more exposed to erosion when external scrutiny is weakened.

In the years since withdrawal, litigation and advocacy strategies have adapted to this fragmented landscape. Women’s rights organizations have redirected efforts toward constitutional avenues and domestic administrative channels, while also countering organized disinformation about the Convention. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and rapporteur Zita Gurmai have identified such disinformation as part of a broader European backlash against the Convention. For Turkey, this dynamic is compounded by what civil society monitors have continued to document: a high number of suspicious female deaths and femicides in the country, a finding that PACE’s Resolution 2649 (2026) explicitly recorded in expressing its regret at the 2021 withdrawal. These developments are not necessarily caused by withdrawal in a direct sense, but they are consistent with what the loss of external monitoring tends to produce: a shift from systematic visibility to fragmented, episodic accountability.

Economic violence is precisely the form of harm for which this institutional erosion is most consequential. Unlike physical violence, it is slow, cumulative, and dependent on administrative recognition: it becomes legally legible only when institutions actively count it, train for it, and incorporate it into risk-assessment procedures. The GREVIO framework was one mechanism for sustaining that pressure. Its absence does not make economic violence invisible overnight, but it removes a standing obligation to measure, report, and publicly justify the adequacy of state responses. This is why the governance response matters: if external monitoring no longer structures the conversation, domestic institutions must be able to generate their own visibility, data, and coordination for a form of harm that is especially difficult to detect.

Beyond the Vacuum Debate

If the real problem is institutional fragility, the next question is what kind of governance response is needed. The answer is not more abstraction about norms, but more attention to whether institutions can act together. Economic violence requires multi-actor public governance across courts, police, local administrations, shelters, ŞÖNİM, social assistance, and labour-market institutions. It also requires data systems capable of following a survivor’s path across those bodies rather than treating each contact point as a separate and closed file. 

Here, the comparative value of J-PAL is helpful if used carefully. J-PAL’s Crime, Violence, and Conflict work explicitly focuses on identifying effective strategies for preventing and responding to violence, and its evidence-to-policy work shows how institutional design can improve access to justice. In India, for example, J-PAL documents how women’s help desks in police stations increased registration of crimes against women and domestic violence, especially when women officers staffed them. In Mexico City, J-PAL also highlights a government collaboration that embedded evidence-informed practices into policy design and delivery for women facing violence. These examples are not templates for Turkey, but they underline a crucial point: institutional visibility does not happen by itself; it must be designed. 

That is also why the survivor-centered strand of New Public Governance matters here. If ŞÖNİM is treated only as a crisis-response node, it will not address economic violence adequately. If it is instead treated as a gateway to economic autonomy, then service design must connect emergency measures to housing, income support, childcare, maintenance enforcement, legal assistance, and access to work. Women with children, migrant women, women without independent income, and women reliant on informal family economies do not experience economic violence in identical ways. A functioning response therefore has to be intersectional, coordinated, and materially oriented—not merely declaratory. 

Turkey’s experience should therefore be read as a warning against treating withdrawal as a purely symbolic or purely doctrinal event. The Istanbul Convention’s disappearance from the domestic legal environment did not simply remove one treaty text. It weakened an accountability framework that helped make institutional failure legible. Where domestic law still recognizes economic violence, the decisive issue becomes whether that law can survive the loss of external scrutiny, political prioritization, and interpretive pressure. That is the real post-withdrawal test. 

And that test is not relevant only to Turkey. Similar patterns may appear wherever international norms are attacked as dispensable once a state claims that domestic law already offers enough protection. The Turkish case suggests that this claim is incomplete at best. Domestic statutes may preserve economic violence on paper. But when monitoring fades, coordination weakens, and implementation becomes politically easier to neglect, those protections grow fragile precisely where survivors need them most. 

The real question for any state contemplating withdrawal is therefore not whether the treaty text can be domestically replicated. It is whether the monitoring, political pressure, civil-society participation, and comparative accountability that give that text institutional life can be replicated as well.