Poland’s Replacement for Istanbul Convention Would Ban Abortion and Gay Marriage

In the letter - leaked to BIRN and published below in its entirety for the first time - that was sent last year to at least four governments in the region (Croatia, Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia), the Polish Justice Ministry sets out its vision over five pages for an alternative to the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, to give the Istanbul Convention its full name.

The new treaty should offer "particular support" to "the protection of the life of a conceived child", which should be understood as ending abortion; and "the concept of marriage remains reserved exclusively for the relationship of a woman and a man".

"In pursuit of the achievement of the objectives stated above and having regard to the constant threats to the family, the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Poland proposes that a convention be drafted together to be forwarded to the possibly wide group of addressees at the international forum," the letter reads.

The ideas laid out in the ministerial letter appear to be, to some extent, a summary of a draft international family rights convention prepared by the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture in cooperation with former Polish MEP Marek Jurek from the Christian Social Congress.

And it was those two ultra-conservative groups that drew up the draft law and collected the necessary 150,000 signatures to create a citizens' initiative to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, which the Sejm, the lower and most important house of the Polish parliament, will consider approving this week.

However, in a statement to BIRN, Marcin Romanowski, undersecretary of state at the Justice Ministry, denied that the proposals of non-governmental organisations that...