Radio Azatutyun. Justice Minister Rustam Badasian said on Monday that Armenia’s government is unlikely to seek parliamentary ratification before the end of this year of a European treaty strongly opposed by the Armenian Apostolic Church and other groups championing traditional family values.
The treaty signed in 2011 and known as the Istanbul Convention commits Council of Europe member states to combatting violence against women. Armenia has still not ratified the convention despite being among its signatories.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government indicated this summer its intention to ensure the treaty’s quick ratification by the parliament. It immediately met with resistance from socially conservative groups and individuals, including the chairman of Armenia’s national bar association.
While supporting the protection of women, opponents object to the Istanbul Convention’s definition of gender as “social roles, behaviors, activities and characteristics that a particular society considers appropriate for women and men.” They say this paves way for introducing transsexual or transgender as separate categories and legalizing same-sex marriage.
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The top clergymen of the state-backed Armenian Apostolic Church added their voice to these objections in late July, urging the authorities not to ratify the convention. In a joint declaration, they said it poses a threat to traditional marriage defined by Armenian law as a union between a man and a woman.
The outcry appears to have at least slowed down the ratification process, with the government deciding earlier this month to ask a Council of Europe body, the Venice Commission, for an advisory opinion on the treaty’s conformity with Armenia’s constitution.
Badasian said the commission will present its arguments in October. The government will then have to discuss the matter in detail before sending the convention to the National Assembly for ratification, he said, adding that a parliamentary debate on it this year is therefore “not realistic.”
Badasian at the same time continued to dismiss the critics’ arguments and insist that the convention’s ratification could not obligate the Armenian authorities to legalize same-sex marriages or adoption of children by LGBT people. He said he too is too opposed to such marriages.
“A family must continue to be a union of a man and a woman,” the minister told reporters. “Only members of a family recognized by the state, namely a man and a woman, can adopt children. This is my position.”
Badasian also argued that neighboring Georgia has not scrapped or amended its legal provisions against same-sex marriage as a result of ratifying the Istanbul Convention.
For the same reasons the convention has also sparked controversy in several other Council of Europe member states. Two of them, Bulgaria and Slovakia, rejected it last year.
In Croatia, the parliament ratified the treaty in April 2018 amid protests by local social conservatives. To placate them, the Croatian government adopted a separate statement saying the treaty will not change Croatia’s legal definition of marriage as a union between man and woman.
Photo – Armenia, Riot police confront anti-LGBT protesters outside the parliament building in Yerevan, April 8, 2019 (by Radio Azatutyun)
