It's no wonder, I think the spirit of the agreement can be seen from its preamble: it is extremely anti-family, imbued with gender ideology and actually represents extreme man-hating feminism. In short, the convention meant to protect women turned out to be very anti-women.

The upper house of the Czech parliament did not approve the Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe on the prevention and reduction of violence against women and domestic violence on Wednesday evening.

After about seven hours of heated debate, only 34 of the 71 senators present at the time of the vote in the 81-member body supported the adoption of the agreement. The ratification of the document would have required at least 36 votes.

The Czech Republic signed the Istanbul Convention - which entered into force on August 1, 2014 - in 2016, but the legislature did not put ratification on the agenda for a long time, the process of this only started last summer. In the Upper House, President Petr Pavel's appeal on Wednesday, in which he requested the ratification of the convention, also remained unanswered.

The Istanbul convention protecting women is anti-feminist (video)

The Istanbul Convention has been the subject of sharp debates between the liberal and conservative parts of Czech society for years, and this was reflected in the vote.

The adoption of the legislation was mostly supported by senators from the Pirate Party and the Mayors and Independent Personalities Party, while the senatorial factions of the Social Democratic Party and the Action of Yes - Disgruntled Citizens rejected it. Senators from two right-wing factions, the Citizens' Democratic Party and the TOP 09 party, supported and rejected the legislation roughly half-to-half.

The international document should not have been discussed by the lower house of parliament, the House of Representatives, but given the decision of the Senate, it probably won't.

Representatives of the Christian churches welcomed the Senate's decision, while Martin Dvorák, the government's minister responsible for European affairs, described the upper house's rejection of the legislation as "a shame in Europe". The Czech Republic is thus one of the few countries that has signed but not ratified the convention.

MTI

Featured Image: Kallos Bea | Source: MTI/MTVA