Istanbul Convention – further action by the Italian authorities needed
ITALY: GREVIO BASELINE EVALUATION REPORT
2019
Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO), Baseline Evaluation Report Italy, 2019.
«While GREVIO welcomes Italy’s ratification of the Istanbul Convention, it has identified a number of priority issues requiring further action by the Italian authorities to comply fully with the convention’s provisions. Drawing from the above and in addition thereto, these relate to the need to:
• ensure an application of the legal provisions on the offence of ill-treatment in the family which is sensitive to the gendered nature of domestic violence against women;
• ensure that the provisions of the Istanbul Convention are implemented without discrimination on any of the grounds listed in Article 4, paragraph 3, which would include inter alia mainstreaming the prevention of gender-based violence in the activities of the national body(ies) mandated to combat discrimination and in programmes which are tailored to the specific needs of women who are or might be exposed to intersectional discrimination;
• ensure that policies and measures equally address prevention, protection, investigation and punishment, in accordance with the due diligence standard enshrined in Article 5 of the Istanbul Convention;
• take further measures to ensure that policies address violence against women in a comprehensive and integrated fashion and are implemented and monitored by way of an effective co-ordination between national, regional and local authorities;
• ensure appropriate financial and human resources for measures and policies, while increasing the transparency and accountability in the use of public funds and developing appropriate longterm/multi-annual financing solutions for women’s specialist services;
• reinforce the support and recognition of independent women’s organisations and strengthen the national and local institutional framework for consulting and co-operating with women’s organisations;
• provide a strong institutional basis for the bodies mandated to ensure the implementation and co-ordination of measures and policies to combat violence against women and pursue efforts to enable an effective monitoring and evaluation of policies;
• improve data collection in line with the requirements of Article 11 of the convention;
• reinforce preventive actions in the fields of awareness-raising, education, training of professionals, perpetrator programmes and the employment sector, while pursuing proactive and sustained measures to promote changes in sexist social and cultural patterns of behaviour that are based on the idea of inferiority of women;
• step up victims’ access to general support services which are adequately distributed throughout the territory, properly resourced and provided by trained staff members.»