Thousands rally in Turkey against violence towards women / Photo: Yasin AKGUL - AFP
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Thousands rally in Turkey against violence towards women
Around two thousand protesters rallied in Istanbul on Tuesday to denounce gender-based violence in Turkey, where around half of murders of women remain unsolved.
Chanting the names of victims, the demonstrators, most of them women, members of the LGBTQ community or both, marched up a section of the busy Istiklal avenue, without clashes breaking out with the police watching on.
Previous rallies in Turkey marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, as well as for International Women's Day in March, have seen heavy-handed policing and many protesters arrested.
Turkey does not collate official figures on femicides, leaving the job to women's organisations which collect data on murders and other suspicious deaths from press reports.
According to figures collected by the We Will Stop Femicides platform, 235 women were killed by men between January and October 2025 while 247 others died under suspicious circumstances.
Rights groups believe that the number of women's deaths classed as suspicious or as suicide in Turkey has risen since Ankara withdrew from an international convention on violence against women in 2021.
That agreement, dubbed the Istanbul Convention, requires countries to set up laws aimed at preventing and prosecuting violence against women.
E.Goossens--JdB
