GREVIO publishes 1st General Activity Report

The Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention) is the most far-reaching and legally binding international treaty to tackle this serious violation of human rights. The Convention is based on the understanding that violence against women is a gender-based violence that is committed against women solely because they are women and that it derives from a global culture of discrimination which denies women equal rights with men. 

The Convention claims the implementation of measures to fulfill its core issues: prevention, protection and prosecution.
A crucial part of the Istanbul Convention plays the monitoring mechanism which assesses how well its requirements and provisions are put into practice by States Parties to the Convention.

The monitoring process consists of two pillars: The Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO), an independent expert body, and the Committee of the Parties, a political body composed of official representatives of the States Parties to the Convention. Their findings and recommendations will help to ensure states’ compliance with the convention and guarantee its long-term effectiveness. An important source of information for GREVIO in the process of monitoring are civil society organizations.

GREVIO has published its 1st General Activity Report, covering the period from September 2015 to May 2019. 

This report is the first to present the trends and challenges related to the implementation of the Istanbul Convention. By explaining GREVIO’s mandate, composition and working methods, the report demonstrates how, as an independent monitoring body, GREVIO has joined the ranks of other international and regional women’s rights monitoring bodies. It has thus become an important voice in the fields of preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.

In the period under review, GREVIO has published first baseline evaluation reports on Albania, Austria, Denmark, Monaco, Montenegro, Portugal, Sweden and Turkey. On-site evaluations of Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Serbia have also been carried out.

Click here to read more about the report.