Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence

Baroness Sugg Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

My Lords, it has been just over 10 years since the UK signed the convention, and I welcome the Government’s announcement that it should finally be ratified by the end of July this year. I thank the Home Secretary, the many Ministers across government who have been involved, and Nimco Ali, the independent government adviser on tackling violence against women and girls, for getting us to this position. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, for her tenacious work in pushing the Government to ratification.

I also take this opportunity to commend President Zelensky of Ukraine. Despite everything that is happening in his country, last Tuesday he signed into law a Bill ratifying the Istanbul convention. As he said when signing:

“Its main content is simple, but extremely important. It is a commitment to protect women from violence and various forms of discrimination.”


Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and, no doubt, other noble Lords, I have questions about the reservations on Articles 44 and 59. My noble friend the Minister will have seen the correspondence from 80 organisations working with and for women, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, referred. There are concerns that placing these reservations, particularly on Article 59, risks the creation of a two-tier system, whereby migrant women are given a lesser status and fewer protections from violence, and that it may reinforce the power of the perpetrators and increase the risk faced by migrant survivors—all this while migrant women survivors already face additional obstacles to accessing support and justice.

I understand that the Government’s position on Article 59 is under review, pending the results of the pilot. I would welcome an update from my noble friend the Minister on this review, as well as a response to the argument that the pilot has no clear link with the article in question.

The reservation on Article 44 would appear to mean that women who are subjected to some offences abroad by a UK resident who is not a UK national will not be able to seek prosecution in the UK unless those offences are also crimes in the country where they happened. This appears to leave open a loophole that will prevent women securing justice. I would be interested in my noble friend the Minister’s explanation as to why this reservation should remain.

My second area of questions relates to the purpose of the convention to promote international co-operation with a view to eliminating violence against women and domestic violence. The UK has a proud history of working with international partners on ending violence against women and girls, including the then Department for International Development’s ground-breaking What Works to Prevent Violence programme, which I am pleased to hear will continue in some form.

Many of us are looking forward to the FCDO’s women and girls strategy. Can my noble friend the Minister tell us when this will be published? Given the role that the UK has played previously to end violence against women and girls around the world, I very much welcome the Foreign Secretary’s commitment to restore funding to women and girls to pre-cuts levels. We have been given a figure of £745 million for this, which is significantly less than the total amount spent on principal and significant investment in gender equality that was cut. Can my noble friend the Minister explain how this figure was reached? I appreciate that these issues are outside his department, so I would be happy for him to follow up in writing.

The Istanbul convention is the first instrument in Europe to set legally binding standards specifically to prevent gender-based violence, protect victims of violence and punish perpetrators. In these troubling times, when we are seeing the frightening rollback of the rights of women and girls in the United States, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the prevention, protection and punishment that the convention provides are more important than ever.

My noble friend will be well aware of the scale of violence against women in this country, and that those rates greatly increased during the pandemic. The UK needs a long-term, practical and targeted approach to ending violence against women in all its forms, and the Istanbul convention offers such an approach. I very much welcome the Government’s move to ratify the convention, and I look forward to my noble friend the Minister’s response.