Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets in Turkey on Saturday, for the second weekend in a row, to protest President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's decision to withdraw from the world's first binding treaty to fight violence against women.
Read also: Turkey leaves the Istanbul Convention punishing violence against women
Already last Saturday, several thousand people demonstrated in Turkey to ask the president to reverse his decision.
In a decree published overnight from Friday to Saturday, Mr. Erdogan announced his country's withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, the first international treaty to set legally binding standards in some thirty countries to prevent gender-based violence.
The move, taken as the murders of women have risen steadily for a decade in Turkey, angered women's rights organizations and critics from the European Union, Washington and Upper United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights.
Justifying the decision to step down, the Turkish presidency claimed last week that the instrument had been "
hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality
", which it said was "
incompatible
" with the "
values social and family
”of Turkey.
In Istanbul's Kadiköy neighborhood, hundreds of women again urged the Turkish president on Saturday to back down, an AFP correspondent noted.
In Ankara, a small group of women demonstrated in the city center, surrounded by riot police.
In the Turkish capital as in Istanbul, chants of "
we are not afraid, we will not remain silent, we will not obey
" were heard.
To read also: Paris "united" with Turkish women after the exit of Ankara from a European convention
The news of the death of a 17-year-old pregnant girl, stabbed in the Aegean province of Izmir according to the official Anadolu news agency, caused a stir on Saturday.
The suspect would be the man she lived with.
In 2020, 300 women were murdered in Turkey and there is no sign of slowing this trend, with 87 women killed so far this year, according to women's rights group We Will Stop Femicide Platform.