On international women’s day, the Human Right Legal Project wishes to contribute to the public dialogue held around GREVIO’s first report on Greece by highlighting a number of violations of the Istanbul Convention that, regrettably, the competent national authorities have so far done little to redress. The violations in question concern, inter alia,
● gender-based violence during pushbacks
● the conditions of detention of women in the Closed Controlled Access Centre of Samos
● the rights of victims of sex trafficking, most of whom are women, and
● the possibilities that migrant victims of gender-based violence realistically have of raising their complaints.
HRLP has first-hand knowledge of the above through its work on criminalisation of people on the move, police/state violence, collective expulsion, forced/informal returns, denial of access to healthcare and arbitrary detention.
It is its grassroots experience that HRLP decided to bring to the attention of the Council of Europe by making a joint submission – together with I Have Rights – on the occasion of the recent visit to Greece of the Expert Group on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO).
HRLP welcomes the fact that many of its concerns have been echoed in GREVIO’s above-mentioned report of 14.11.23.
It also salutes the initiative of the Marangopoulos Foundation for Human Rights to organise a well-publicised event on 26.3.24 on the first evaluation of Greece’s compliance with the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention).
It stresses the unique importance of GREVIO’s reports which not only deal with one of the most topical issues nowadays but also provide the backdrop for the examination by the European Court of Human Rights of numerous applications, several of which have been submitted by HRLP.
It calls on the Greek authorities to comply with GREVIO’s very apposite evidence-based recommendations, as contained in the above-mentioned report of 14.11.23.
And it reaffirms its unwavering commitment to the fight for the right of migrant women to live free of gender-based violence, as well as its intention to continue engaging with the issue through litigation at national and European level and through a constructive dialogue in institutional fora such as GREVIO’s.