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Women’s and LGBTQ Rights Continue to Erode Under Poland’s Ruling Party

Wmc features womens day protest warsaw 2018 Grzegorz Żukowski CC BY NC 2 0 102920
In 2018, protesters took to the streets of Warsaw on International Women’s Day. (photo by Grzegorz Żukowski CC BY-NC 2.0)

“They want mothers and martyrs who humbly bear ‘their cross,’” says Renata Durda.

The head of Niebieska Linia (Blue Line), a national emergency service organization in Poland for victims of domestic violence, Durda doesn’t mince her words when it comes to the current Polish ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS).

In power since 2015, PiS has slowly chipped away at freedom of speech, of the media, and of the judiciary, imposing increasingly draconian measures. In recent years, Polish state TV, which is supposed to be neutral, has now effectively become a government mouthpiece, promoting the ruling party and criticizing opposition leaders. Meanwhile, legislation has left Polish judges at risk of dismissal if they oppose the government’s judicial reforms.

But Polish women in particular have borne the brunt of new discriminatory policies. This week, major protests have erupted across the country — and across the world — after Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled abortions due to fetal malformation are unconstitutional, effectively banning abortion in Poland completely. Before the ruling, terminations were permitted in only three circumstances: if pregnancy threatens the woman’s health or life, if pregnancy is the result of a criminal act, or if fetal abnormalities are present — a reason that accounted for 98% of all abortions in Poland.

Thousands of Poles have since protested the ruling, amassing on the streets, joining a women’s strike, or joining online action. PiS leaders, however, have claimed the protests aim to destroy the Polish nation, and have called on PiS members to defend churches against demonstrators.

The current protests follow action in previous months against PiS’s curbs to women’s rights. And over the summer, another alarming situation developed: PiS announced its intention to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, a European treaty on violence against women. Forty-five countries, plus the European Union, have signed the treaty, which provides legally binding guidelines to combat domestic violence, which it categorizes as a violation of human rights.

Members of PiS have defended the plan to pull out of the treaty, claiming it threatens Polish tradition and values — family minister Marlena Maląg even dubbed the treaty “left-wing gibberish.” But others claim this decision is yet another example of the government’s misogynistic policies that may leave women under even greater threat.

Over the last five years, women have faced increasing attacks to their rights in Poland. This has come in various forms: The government has limited access to contraception, including making emergency contraception no longer available without prescription. The 2019 Contraception Atlas ranked Poland as the worst-performing county in Europe in terms of access to contraception. There have also been proposals to further limit the already restricted access to abortion — proposals that have been met with widespread protests. Poland has one of the most restrictive laws in Europe, with legal abortions numbering only around 1,000 a year in a country of 38 million people. Even this year, during lockdown, a citizens’ initiative petition that aimed to prohibit certain reasons for abortions was heard in parliament, sparking yet more protests by women’s rights organizations, including women’s social movement Strajk Kobiet and the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning. This time, protests were online, via Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

Durda says PiS, and the religious fundamentalists campaigning to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, “do not understand the changing rules of social life.”

“The old order, when women gave birth to children, cooked in the kitchen, and prayed in church, and had no rights — they like it very much,” she explains.

“The grist to the mill to them is the declining ratio of live births [in Poland and Europe], the flow of migrants in Europe perceived as a threat to ‘purely Polish’ families, created by a pious mother and the father as head of the family.”

PiS has steered a vitriolic campaign against what it sees as culturally foreign invaders. Particularly under attack has been the LGBTQ+ community, with Poland ranked by advocacy group ILGA Europe as the worst country in the EU for LGBTQ+ rights, after years of government-led persecution. In the recent election, incumbent President Andrzej Duda of PiS described the LGBTQ+ movement as an “ideology” worse than Communism.

As many as 97 municipalities across an area spanning a third of Poland have also declared themselves “free from LGBT ideology” or adopted family rights charters in the last year. These charters have been written by ultraconservative legal NGO Ordo Iuris — the organization that has led the campaign against the Istanbul Convention.

Poland’s withdrawal from the Convention is also part of PiS’s clampdown on what they call an “LGBT ideology.” According to PiS, the Convention, which was ratified by the previous centrist government in 2015, poses a danger to religion and Polish tradition. In 2014, Ziobro called it a “feminist invention” designed to “justify gay ideology.”

But domestic violence is widespread in Poland, with nearly 250,000 people affected every year, according to police statistics.

Durda says the Istanbul Convention is necessary.

“It is necessary to raise the standard of legal protection and assistance to victims, to improve correction programs for perpetrators, and to broadly apply prevention and education on how to resolve conflicts without violence,” she explains. “It is also vital to train representatives of the police and the judiciary to better understand the psychological situation of victims.”

PiS claims it are doing enough to combat domestic violence, pointing to one recent law that allows for the immediate removal of perpetrators from their victims. But Durda disagrees, pointing out that victims still lack protection against economic violence, and that the legal definition of rape is inadequate.

“In Polish law,” she says, “in order to prove rape, the victim must [prove] that the criminal act was committed with the use of violence, unlawful threat, or deception,” while the Convention defines rape by lack of consent.

Just as in past cases of threats to women’s rights in Poland, the announcement to withdraw from the Convention was met with large protests.

In Warsaw, hundreds of women — many clad in the infamous white hoods of The Handmaid’s Tale — assembled outside the headquarters of Ordo Iuris to demonstrate against the decision. Protests also took place in other Polish cities.

Paulina Krasnodębska, of Warszawskie Dziewuchy, one of the groups involved in protests against the government’s plans, said the Convention is “the only international document introducing standardized regulations regarding antidiscrimination practices and the state’s responsibility in this case.”

“[PiS] started to implement an idea of a strong, conservative, national, and homogenic state with almost no space for diversity, and a role of a woman in this ideology is very specific — it is a very traditional role of a mother and obedient wife, designated to stay at home,” she adds. “The Istanbul Convention says something totally opposite, that we should learn to redefine that kind of social stereotypes, because they can create oppression.”



More articles by Category: International, LGBTQIA, Politics, Violence against women
More articles by Tag: Reproductive rights, Extremism, Europe, Domestic violence, Activism and advocacy, Abortion
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