Guest Editors’ Introduction: Symposium on the IACL’s New Research Group on Gender and Constitutions

Valentina Rita Scotti, Janaina Penalva and Irene Spigno

Koç University, University of Brasília and Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila.

Back in 2018, during the IACL World Congress in Seoul, we realized that throughout the program several speeches touched gender-related issues but only a single panel was explicitly focused on them. We also realized the lack of a permanent group researching on these issues and, on the advice of Prof. Surya Deva, we decided to accept the challenge of creating one. As of February 2021, the Research Group on Gender and Constitutions (GC) already gathers 50 members, including senior and early-career scholars from every region, and has established collaborations with educational institutions, international organizations, national human rights institutions and civil society organizations.  

Thanks to the sense of community established among this wide network, the GC is conducting several projects, including a research project on the state-of-art of women’s rights protection at the global level. The first research findings of this project were discussed in a devoted workshop, virtually hosted by Koç University (Istanbul – Turkey) in September 2020, and represented the first step for the comparative analysis the GC aims at presenting at the next IACL World Congress in December 2022.  

Moreover, in the crucial period of the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, the GC also established an Observatory collecting scholarly contributions underscoring the risks and challenges for the protection of women’s reproductive rights, for the promotion of gender equality in household and child care dynamics, for the protection of women from domestic violence. In this same vein, the GC contributed to the call for submissions made by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women regarding ‘COVID-19 and the increased violence against women’ with a report titled ‘COVID-19: States’ responses to the risk of increased domestic violence against women’.   

The general aim of the GC is to study the ways in which constitutions, national and international courts deal with gender equality and women’s rights issues from a comparative perspective. We are convinced that this fundamental field of study represents a necessary dimension to assess the quality, scope and limits of contemporary constitutionalism. Notably, the GC focuses on crucial issues still pending in the fields of the protection of women’s rights, such as the guarantee of equality in marital relations, the protection of women’s autonomy and independence, sexual and reproductive rights, especially the right to abortion, states’ commitment to end specific gender-related physical, psychological and sexual violence. The GC also focuses on issues as substantive gender equality, intersectional discriminations, representation of women and LGBTIAQ+ people in the legal profession, the role of women and LGBTIAQ+  people in constitution-making, access to public services, the right to political participation, as well as sexual harassment and gender-based violence, reproductive rights, the impact of religious norms on the enforcement of patriarchal hetero-normativity, women’s rights in war and post-conflict situations, and transitional justice. 

In this Symposium, we want to share with the IACL and wider academic community the findings of a parallel research about the challenges to the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention) in the populist contexts of Hungary, Poland and Turkey. Indeed, the heteronormative binary vision of the society populist political forces aim at realizing clashes with the idea of gender equality promoted in the Convention. Furthermore, while the latter commits states in protecting women from gender-based violence including domestic violence, populist forces increasingly conceive the family as the pivotal societal structure which shall be safeguarded at all costs, even at the price of ‘forgiving’ abusive partners. These clear dichotomies resulted in attempts of withdrawal or in missed ratifications as discussed in the present Symposium.  

Indeed, it is structured around the following contributions: 

• Using Shifting Narratives to Undermine Gender Equality: Comparative Insights from Hungary, Poland and Turkey – Agnieszka Bień-Kacała (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland)  

• The (Non)-Ratification of the Istanbul Convention: Specialities of the Related Political Discourse in Hungary - Tímea Drinóczi (University of Pécs, Hungary) and Lídia Balogh (Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence) 

• Istanbul Convention in Poland - from ratification to unconstitutionality? – Julia Kapelańska-Pręgowska (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland) 

• Implementation of the Istanbul Convention in the shadow of populism: the case of Poland – Katarzyna Sękowska-Kozłowska (Poznań Human Rights Centre, Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences) 

• The debate on the Istanbul Convention in Turkey: a populist reinterpretation of the principle of gender equality – Valentina Rita Scotti (Koç University, School of Law, Istanbul, Turkey) 

We warmly appreciate the IACL Blog editors’ willingness to host this Symposium. We hope it will contribute to bring scholarly attention to gender related issues, put scholars in contact with the Research Group ‘Gender and Constitutions’, and create synergies with other Research Groups in the IACL. We very much look forward to receive ideas, comments and suggestions to continue developing this exciting project.  

If you are interested in joining the GC, you can do so at the GC website or contact the co-chairs: vrscotti1@gmail.com, jlpenalva@gmail.com, irene.spigno@gmail.com.  

Valentina Rita Scotti, Post-doctoral researcher at Koç University, School of Law, Istanbul, Turkey 

Janaina Penalva, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Brasília, Brazil 

Irene Spigno, Director of the Academia Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, México 

Suggested Citation: Valentina Rita Scotti, Janaina Penalva and Irene Spigno, ‘Guest Editor’s Introduction: Symposium on the IACL’s New Research Group on Gender and Constitutions’ IACL-AIDC Blog (4 February 2021) https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/gender/2021/2/4/editorial-guest-editors-introduction-symposium-on-the-iacls-new-research-group-on-gender-and-constitutions?rq=gender.