The President should transmit to Parliament the bill to ratify the Istanbul Convention and the legislature should adopt this. The Republic of Moldova should ratify the Istanbul Convention as this is now the most efficient international instrument for preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, says a study conducted by Doina Dragomir, of the WatchDog.MD community, IPN reports.

According to the study, Moldova signed the Istanbul Convention in 2017 and then adjusted its legislation to the norms of the Convention. “Even if experts in the field say that the Republic of Moldova is ready to ratify the Convention, the ratification itself was put off for several times,” runs the study.

According to Doina Dragomir, as a result of an appeal made by civil society, the Government led by Ion Chicu on December 27 last year approved the bill to ratify the Convention, but the nature of the informal relations between President Igor Dodon and the Russian Orthodox Church could be an obstacle to the ratification. During his last official visit to Moscow, Igor Dodon assured the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church that “our people will remain faithful to our Church and all the branches of power in our country will pay special attention to the keeping of our traditional values and strengthening of the status of family in our society.”

At the same time, any advancement of the public speech and legislation concerning the ratification of the Convention is followed by manipulative speeches and false information disseminated by several conservative and ultra-religious groups. Such untruths as the fact that the Convention obliges the states to define the term of family can be easily combated by simply reading the document.

“It is important to ratify it as the Istanbul Convention clearly says that the responsibility for preventing violence against women, both the causes and symptoms, is borne by the state. This means that the problem of domestic violence is no longer a private or insoluble issue by its abstract nature, but is a realizable obligation of the state to protect the female victims and to prosecute the abusers,” says the study.

The most recent data published by the General Police Inspectorate show that an average of 30 complaints about acts of violence in the family are recorded daily. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, each third female victim (34%) said that they never reported the acts of violence to which they were subjected.