Ratification Without Revolution

by Pınar Palabıyık

All conventions are alike; each withdrawal is withdrawn in its own way.

It was the best of intentions, it was the worst of reservations. (An ode to Tolstoy and Dickens)

A Day of Orange, A Year of Silence

Each year, as November 25th nears, the world turns briefly orange. Timelines fill with declarations of “No to violence against women,” curated in careful fonts and cautious sincerity. For a few hours, the crisis becomes visible; for a few hours, the language feels urgent. And then, by the morning of November 26th, the notifications fall quiet, the feeds return to their usual cadence, and the performance of concern recedes.

This cycle — a day of speaking followed by a year of silence — is its own kind of fatigue, not because violence tires, but because the world behaves as though attention can substitute for action. And yet, beneath every banner and every fleeting slogan, something steadier survives: a stubborn belief in a future where no woman walks alone.

The Annual Ritual of Caring About Women

What follows every November 25th is less remembrance than ritual. A choreography of institutional conscience-clearing: monuments lit in orange, ministers posting carefully worded condemnations, corporate accounts speaking the language of empowerment while outsourcing inequality. It is public relations dressed as progress.

The temporary visibility of women’s suffering is treated as evidence of action, as though acknowledgement were remedy. But attention is not protection. And awareness is not consequence.

Meanwhile, the statistics remain unforgiving. In Turkey alone, at least 315 women were killed by men in 2024, most by husbands or partners — violence that is not exceptional, but expected.

The world performs concern; women perform survival.

Anıt Sayaç 2025

The Law’s Theater of Virtue

International law, ever the gentleman, promises protection but never pays alimony. It ratifies, endorses, reaffirms — verbs that sound heroic in Geneva and hollow in Gaziantep.

The UN adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 1993, apparently convinced that one more declaration might finally make it stop. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) dates back to 1979. The United States — architect of modern human-rights language — still has not ratified it. Apparently, equality must first clear the Senate.

Europe seemed more ambitious. The Istanbul Convention, adopted in 2011, treated gender-based violence not as a private tragedy but as a public crime. It bound states to act, not just to sympathize. For once, a treaty sounded like it might mean business.

And then, in 2021, Turkey — the country that had given its name to the convention — decided to withdraw.

A protest calling for Istanbul Convention to protect women’s lives. (Turkiye)

From Opuz to Exit

The irony of this decision is sharp. In 2009, the European Court of Human Rights delivered Opuz v. Turkey, a landmark judgment recognizing that a state’s failure to protect women from domestic violence could amount to gender discrimination and inhuman treatment. It was the case that helped inspire the Istanbul Convention itself.

Yet, a little more than a decade later, the same country rescinded the very framework built in Opuz’s shadow. The withdrawal came by presidential decree, signed at midnight — the preferred hour for dismantling rights.

International outrage followed in the usual choreography: statements of “deep concern,” diplomatic regret, carefully worded tweets. Deep concern, however, has never saved a single life.

It is a bitter symmetry — a nation once praised for setting precedent now writing the epilogue to its own judgment.

Constitutions Without Daughters

Violence against women is often treated as an enforcement problem, a failure of implementation. In truth, it is older and deeper — a failure of imagination. The modern legal order was written by men who did not consider women absent; they simply considered them irrelevant.

When the United States declared that “all men are created equal,” it meant precisely that. Men — white men, to be exact. European charters that enshrined liberty and fraternity took centuries to recall the missing sister. Even the most developed democracies excluded women from voting long after they had mastered industrial war. How shocked should we be that they still struggle to prosecute crimes committed against them?

Turkey’s own republican reforms tell a similar story. Women were granted civil and political rights early in the twentieth century, but always from above. Modernization was scripted as emancipation, not participation. Suffrage came as a gesture of progress — and an alibi for deeper silences.

When the rule of law was born, women were not in the delivery room. They arrived later, summoned to clean up the mess.

Intersectional Blindness

Law prefers its victims neat and classifiable. Gender, unfortunately, refuses to stay in one box.

As Kimberlé Crenshaw argued decades ago, the systems that govern identity — gender, race, class, immigration status — intersect in ways law often refuses to see. The “universal woman” of legal discourse is white, urban, documented, and safely middle-class. She is the woman international institutions photograph in brochures, the one whose suffering can be narrated without political discomfort.

She is not the migrant cleaner in a Dutch nursing home, the Kurdish woman filing a police complaint against her husband’s cousin, or the refugee whose bruises don’t fit the eligibility criteria of humanitarian relief.

Apparently, patriarchy has a visa regime.

Pascal Masegesse – "The Red on Her Face"

The Men Who Care (and Other Fairy Tales)

Every November, the men who run things remember to care. Presidents post tributes to their daughters. CEOs issue statements of solidarity while maintaining pay gaps. Universities hold panels titled “Women in Leadership,” moderated, inevitably, by men.

Progress is measured in awareness, a word elastic enough to fit any failure. We “raise awareness” about femicide as if patriarchy were merely uninformed.

Meanwhile, funding for women’s shelters evaporates, reproductive rights erode, and every new policy comes with the footnote subject to budgetary availability. The United Nations’ campaign color is “orange for optimism.” Because nothing says hope like the hue of a caution sign.

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite's fairy illustrations had a distinctly Australian feel. (ABC RN: Anna Kelsey-Sugg)

Ratification Without Revolution

International law thrives on paperwork. It adores signatures, reservations, and periodic reports — a choreography of compliance that produces more archives than accountability. States sign, ratify, withdraw, reinterpret. The system is designed to admire itself.

CEDAW, the Istanbul Convention, national action plans: these are the receipts of good intentions. They document participation, not transformation. The global system measures progress by ratification, not revolution.

And yet revolution was always the point — to redefine the private as political, to treat safety as a precondition for citizenship, to make equality constitutional rather than charitable.

Instead, we inhabit a world where treaties are symbolic and violence structural, where the paperwork of protection outpaces its practice.

A Coda of Courage

Still, in the darkness, there is movement — slow, deliberate, insistent.

Hope survives in the women who refuse to wait for ratification. Afghan girls teaching one another to read under a ban. Iranian women cutting their hair and chanting Zan, Zendegi, Azadi. Turkish women marching despite police lines, holding placards with the names of the dead.

The Feminista Melbourne Collective created a mural in Brunswick of Mahsa Jina Amini, who was killed one year ago. (ABC News: Olivia Ralph.)

They are not the beneficiaries of international law; they are its unfinished chapters. They do the work that treaties only promise — rewriting the social contract with courage as their citation.

I write this as a woman who studied and taught international law in a country that unlearned it overnight — doctrines I once explained in classrooms, knowing even then how fragile they were beyond the syllabus. The cynicism is earned, but so is the defiance. For every convention abandoned, there is a protest born. For every woman silenced, another finds the words that law forgot.

Next November 25th, the world will rehearse its empathy again. The monuments will turn orange; the statements will be issued; the designated hashtags will circulate for a few hours and then dissolve into the background. These symbolic days have become the pacifiers patriarchy hands out when it cannot offer protection — ritualised concern in place of consequence.

And yet, we do not stop. Not because these days compel us, but because the women we failed demand it — the ones whose names filled case files, whose stories shaped judgments, whose lives became evidence.

We keep challenging the distance between words and action, between visibility and safety, between recognition and justice — no matter how often symbolic days are offered to us instead of change.

We do not stop fighting.

Not today.

Not on November 25th.

Not ever.

Pınar Palabıyık is a legal scholar and legal compliance professional based in Amsterdam. She writes on international law, constitutional theory, and the poetics of legality.

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