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Andrej Babiš’s government has revoked the 2023 resolution by which consent was given to continue the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, formally ending the process at the governmental level.

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The decision was revealed by the Czech news portal irozhlas.cz — the government issued no press release and made no mention of it at any press conference.

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This step is a consequence of the Czech Senate’s rejection of ratification on January 24, 2024, when the proposal fell two votes short of the required majority.

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Critics of the convention, including Senators Zdeněk Hraba and Jiří Oberfalzer, pointed to its ideological character and its replacement of the concept of biological sex with the category of “gender.”

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The Ordo Iuris Institute has prepared an alternative — a draft Convention on the Rights of the Family, which protects the family as the fundamental unit of society and is free of ideological assumptions.

The Czech Republic Changes Its Mind

On June 22, the Czech government, led by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, decided to revoke the June 2023 resolution of the previous cabinet of Petr Fiala, by which the executive branch had consented to continuing the process of ratifying the Istanbul Convention. This decision formally ends the ratification process at the governmental level and — significantly — was taken without any press release or mention at a government press conference. The content of the resolution was only revealed by the Czech news portal irozhlas.cz, which obtained the document, hitherto undisclosed by the government.

The justification of the resolution states that the motion for consent to ratification was not considered by the Chamber of Deputies during the previous parliamentary term and that the Senate did not adopt a resolution on the matter — a formal confirmation of the fact that the ratification process had long remained in a state of suspension.

Opposition to Genderism on the Vltava

The current government’s decision is a consequence of the earlier decision of the Czech Senate. On January 24, 2024, the upper house of the Czech Parliament rejected the draft resolution granting consent to the ratification of the convention — of the 71 senators present, only 34 supported the proposal, two votes short of the required majority. Twenty-eight senators voted against, and nine abstained.

A particular role in the Senate debate was played by the position of the Constitutional and Legal Committee, presented by Senator Zdeněk Hraba, according to which the convention is an ideological document that in practice will not help victims of domestic violence. Senate Vice-President Jiří Oberfalzer, in turn, pointed to the fact that the convention repeatedly uses the term “gender” instead of “sex,” thereby blurring the biological differences between women and men. The Czech news portal “Seznam Zprávy” revealed at the time that at least one of the senators had at his disposal an analysis of the Istanbul Convention prepared by the Ordo Iuris Institute, attached to the international petition “Stop Gender. Stand for Family,” which was translated in 2020 into 17 languages, including Czech.

What Is the Istanbul Convention?

The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, commonly known as the Istanbul Convention, has, since its adoption in 2011, aroused serious controversy extending far beyond its declared aim of protecting victims of violence. The most frequently raised objection is its introduction into the legal order of the concept of socio-cultural gender understood as a social construct independent of a person’s biological sex. Controversy also surrounds Article 12(1) of the convention, which obliges states parties to take measures aimed at eradicating the “stereotyped roles for women and men” and traditions regarded as a source of violence. The Bulgarian Constitutional Court ruled in July 2018 that the convention is incompatible with that country’s constitution precisely because of its relativization of the biological differences between the sexes. The convention’s supporters counter these objections by pointing out that the document does not impose an obligation to change the definition of marriage or gender identity, and that its main purpose remains the creation of systemic protection for victims of domestic and sexual violence.

Yes to Protecting the Family, No to Ideology

As a substantive alternative to the Istanbul Convention, free of ideological assumptions, the Ordo Iuris Institute has drawn up a draft Convention on the Rights of the Family — the world’s first draft international agreement guaranteeing the fundamental rights and freedoms of the family as the fundamental unit of society. The document expresses values such as the protection of life from conception to natural death, the protection of the identity of marriage as a union of a woman and a man, and the recognition of the family as the best environment for a child’s development, and it also sets out clear definitions of marriage, family, sex, and violence. Unlike the Istanbul Convention, which — according to its critics — portrays the family as a source of pathology, the Ordo Iuris Institute’s draft proceeds from the premise that it is precisely a strong family that constitutes the most effective space of protection against violence for all its members. The proposal also provides for the creation of an International Committee on the Rights of the Family, which would monitor the implementation of the convention by states parties.

Andrej Babiš’s government’s decision fits into a broader trend of successive European states recognizing the negative ideological assumptions of the Istanbul Convention. It is significant that this has happened in the Czech Republic, one of the most secularized and atheized countries in the world, where opposition to the convention can hardly be attributed to religious motives. At the same time, the decision reflects a political shift by the cabinet of Babiš, the leader of the ANO movement, who for years was perceived as a centrist politician and who, since returning to power in December 2025, has been consistently moving the emphasis of his policies in a conservative direction, distancing himself from the agenda promoted by EU institutions in the area of social and family policy — emphasizes Patryk Ignaszczak of the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law.

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Source of cover photo: iStock