A12 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALTUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
The Polish government, em-
boldened by a narrow election vic-
tory this month and undeterred
by criticism from European Union
leaders, is considering withdraw-
ing from a treaty aimed at curbing
domestic violence and protecting
women’s rights, with the country’s
minister of justice filing paper-
work on Monday to start the
process.
The move came just one week
after European Union leaders,
bowing to pressure from Poland
and Hungary, relaxed demands
that were supposed to tie funding
in the bloc’s long-term budget to
issues related to rule of law. In the
days since, both Warsaw and Bu-
dapest have pressed ahead with
agendas that critics say compro-
mise judicial independence, me-
dia freedom and gay rights.
Poland’s plan to pull out of the
domestic abuse treaty is likely to
face stiff resistance, however. The
mere suggestion that the govern-
ment wanted to withdraw
prompted thousands of protesters
to take to the streets over the
weekend and led the Council of
Europe, a human rights organiza-
tion with 47 member countries, to
express alarm at the prospect.
The treaty, known as the Istan-
bul Convention, is intended to
combat violence against women
in Europe. Conceived more than a
decade ago, the treaty has been
caught up in a maelstrom of disin-
formation and populist rhetoric,
cast as a threat to national
sovereignty and twisted by con-
spiracy theories and smear cam-
paigns.
The convention has been tar-
geted by far-right and nationalist
leaders across East and Central
Europe and has become a totem in
the battle against what they por-
tray as the too-liberal influences
of Western culture. Although the
treaty does not address issues of
gay rights, opponents have
claimed that the treaty promotes
“L.G.B.T. ideology” and poses a
threat to Christian morality.
Ratification of the treaty has
stalled in several European coun-
tries including Bulgaria, the
Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia
and Slovakia. Russia, which is also
a member of the Council of Eu-
rope, has not signed it.
When a previous Polish govern-
ment ratified the treaty in 2012,
Zbigniew Ziobro, then a member
of the opposition and now the Pol-
ish justice minister, called it “an
invention, a feminist creation
aimed at justifying gay ideology.”
Although the government has
insisted that no final decision has
been made yet, Mr. Ziobro, a law-
maker from United Poland, the
more conservative member of the
governing coalition, organized a
news conference on Monday to
say that he had started the
process of withdrawal.
Mr. Ziobro also said he believed
that Poland had “a higher level of
protection of women than in the
convention,” and he added that
the treaty had “a second part,
which concerns ideology and
harms the interests of women and
of family.”
Mr. Ziobro’s increasing attacks
on the treaty came just one week
after the leaders of the 27 member
nations of the European Union
agreed to take on hundreds of bil-
lions of euros in common debt. To
convince Poland and Hungary to
back the deal, European leaders
watered down language making
funding conditional on the rule-of-
law benchmarks.
Returning from Brussels,
where the budget negotiations
had taken place, Prime Minister
Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland
said his country had notched a
success. “We are coming back as
the great winner,” he said.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of
Hungary struck a similar note.
His government has been solidi-fying control over the country’s
news media in ways critics say un-
dermine press freedom.
Hungary signed onto the Istan-
bul Convention in 2014 but has
never ratified the treaty. The most
recent attempt to get legislative
approval came at the height of the
coronavirus pandemic in May and
failed.
David Vig, director of Amnesty
International in Hungary, said
then that the decision was “ex-
tremely dangerous coming at a
time when reported domestic vio-
lence incidents in Hungary have
doubled since the start of the
COVID-19 lockdown.”
The attack on the treaty in Po-
land has been folded into a
broader culture war — a fight over
values that led to the one of the
closest presidential contests since
the first partially free election was
held in the former communist
country in 1989.
Strong rhetoric against gaysand lesbians were at the heart of
President Andzrej Duda’s cam-
paign for re-election. He said
“L.G.B.T. ideology” was more
dangerous than communist doc-
trine.
Mr. Duda narrowly won, in
large part thanks to support from
influential members of the Catho-
lic clergy.
On Friday, thousands of women,
some dressed as characters from
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” demon-
strated outside the headquarters
of a conservative Catholic group,
Ordo Iuris, in Warsaw.
Protesters held up the obituar-
ies of Polish women killed by their
partners and husbands.
“This government has been
laughing in the faces of victims of
gender violence for years,” said
Marta Lempart, one of the leaders
of the Polish Women’s Strike,
which previously organized na-
tionwide protests of the govern-
ment’s attempts to tighten whatare already some of Europe’s most
restrictive abortion laws.
Marija Pejcinovic Buric, secre-
tary general of the Council of Eu-
rope, said in a statement on Sun-
day that Poland’s withdrawal
from the Istanbul Convention
“would be highly regrettable and a
major step backwards in the pro-
tection of women against violence
in Europe.”
While it does not carry legal
force in any country, the treaty’s
signatories are expected to intro-
duce laws which criminalize psy-
chological and physical violence
against women, including sexual
violence, rape, stalking, forced
marriage and forced abortion.
The states that ratify the docu-
ment also commit to prevent and
prosecute crimes against women;
introduce educational campaigns
about the topic; and adhere to a
monitoring procedure, assessing
the implementation of the treaty.
In Slovakia, which has signedbut not ratified, the treaty has
been targeted by a wide range of
groups on the right, including the
neo-fascist Kotlebists — People’s
Party Our Slovakia. During the
prelude to national elections this
year, hundreds of people gathered
in the capital, Bratislava, for a
“prayer” against the “evil from Is-
tanbul.”
In Bulgaria, the treaty has faced
fierce backlash from across the
political spectrum, with critics
claiming that it would force the
country to legalize same-sex mar-
riages and what they refer to as
the “third gender.”
The Bulgarian Constitutional
Court found in 2018 that the con-
vention defined the term “gender”
in a manner incompatible with
Bulgarian law. The judges argued
that by defining gender as a social
construct, the treaty blurred the
lines between the sexes.
“If society loses its ability to dis-
tinguish between a woman and a
man, combating violence against
women would remain a formal yet
futile commitment,” the court
found.
Advocates have condemned the
political efforts to sabotage the
treaty.
“Simply put, the Istanbul Con-
vention aims to prevent and com-
bat violence against women,” said
Radoslav Stoyanov, an expert
with the legal program of the Bul-
garian Helsinki Committee, a hu-
man rights organization based in
the Bulgarian capital, Sofia.“However,” he added, “the public
debate somehow missed the core
aims of the treaty.”
In Poland, withdrawal from the
treaty would probably have little
practical impact because the gov-
ernment has not used it to ad-
vance much legislation that pro-
tects women. Last year, lawmak-
ers proposed defining domestic
violence as having taken place
only when spouses had been beat-
en more than once, a plan that was
abandoned after a fierce backlash.
Domestic violence in Poland is
widespread and underreported,
according to the Warsaw-based
Women’s Rights Center, an orga-
nization that works to prevent at-
tacks against women. The center
estimates that about 800,
women in Poland are victims ev-
ery year, with the 400 to 500
deaths reported each year from
beatings, murder and suicide tied
to domestic violence most likely
understating the problem.
Natalia Broniarczyk, an activist
with the group Abortion Without
Borders, said, “Politicians from
the ruling party know that vio-
lence against women is an every-
day reality in Poland,” adding,
“What is the most cruel is the tim-
ing — they are coming back to the
issue during a pandemic, when
the situation of victims of violence
has gotten much worse, as they
were locked in with their abusers.”Poland Takes Steps to Leave Domestic Violence Treaty, Spurring Outcry
By MARC SANTORAReporting was contributed by
Monika Pronczuk from Brussels,
Anatol Magdziarz from Warsaw,
Kit Gillet from Bucharest, Roma-
nia, Boryana Dzhambazova from
Sofia, Bulgaria, and Miroslava
German Sirotnikova from Brati-
slava, Slovakia.
WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESTop, a protest in Warsaw on Friday against the Polish government’s plans to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention. President
Andzrej Duda of Poland, above right, recently won re-election with a conservative culture war platform. Zbigniew Ziobro, above left,
Poland’s justice minister, said he had started the process of withdrawal. He has opposed the treaty since its ratification in 2012.RAFAL GUZ/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK AGENCJA GAZETA/VIA REUTERSPopulist leaders say
an accord threatens
Christian morality.
Military prosecutors struggling
to restart war crimes tribunals at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the
midst of the pandemic are propos-
ing to transform the crude court
compound of tents and trailers
into a quarantine zone.
The plan would airlift about 100
people from across the United
States to Guantánamo on Sept. 5
— everyone bound for the court-
room, except the defendants —
and then isolate them for two
weeks at the makeshift site called
Camp Justice. Then the men ac-
cused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks would be brought from the
prison to the courtroom to begin
six weeks of hearings in the case,
from Sept. 21 to Nov. 3, the height
of hurricane season.
Efforts to get the hearings go-
ing again face several obstacles.
Guantánamo has no capacity for
widespread coronavirus testing
and must send any samples to
labs in the United States to get re-
sults. The naval base that houses
the courtroom and the prison has
limited health care facilities. And
the case lacks a full-time judge.
A prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett,
notified defense lawyers last week
of the planning, which he said
would consolidate court hearings
and personnel to prevent “posing
unnecessary risk to the resident
base population of 6,000 people.”
Earlier proposals called for key
participants to be quarantined in-
dividually in motel-style guest
quarters and barracks, rather
than in 50 two-person trailers that
require renovation.
Left unclear is how, during two
weeks of quarantine, the legal
teams would prepare for pretrial
hearings in the death-penalty
case against Khalid Shaikh Mo-
hammed and four other men on
charges they conspired in the at-
tacks that killed nearly 3,000 peo-
ple.
Even in the best of times, it is
not easy to hold war court hear-
ings at Guantánamo Bay. The co-
ronavirus crisis has magnified the
challenge.
The 45-square-mile U.S. base at
Guantánamo, behind a Cuban
minefield, functions like a small
American town, with a 12-bed hos-
pital, a school system, bars, a sea-
port and scattered trailer parks
because of a shortage of perma-
nent housing. Participants in the
court proceedings except the de-
fendants fly in regularly from the
mainland.
For the pandemic, the military
stopped most flights, instituted a
quarantine for new arrivals and
imposed a blackout on informa-
tion after disclosing two cases in
the spring.
A boiler broke at the base’s top-
secret Camp 7 prison in June and
it took the military nearly two
months to get a spare part to the
island, leaving high-value pris-
oners and their guards without
hot water at a time of strict hy-
giene guidelines to cope with the
coronavirus.
Now, the military is soliciting
bids from private contractors to
prefabricate, ship and install a
second national security court-
room at the compound. Interested
contractors must reach the base
by early August to quarantine for
two weeks before a site visit the
week of Aug. 17.
The bid will be awarded Nov. 30,
to complete work within six
months, a timetable that would be
hard to meet without quarantinesand the virus. The new courtroom
would accommodate a second mil-
itary judge to hold hearings in
Guantánamo’s other death-pen-
alty case — against a Saudi man
accused of orchestrating the
Qaeda bombing of the U.S. Navy
destroyer Cole off Yemen in 2000.
But hearings in that case are
also on hold. Lawyers for the de-
fendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri,
notified the military judge re-
cently that the prisoner’s 67-year-
old capital lawyer is unable to
travel from his home in South
Florida, a coronavirus hot zone,
and younger defense team mem-
bers near the Pentagon are work-
ing from home because their work
is not deemed essential enough to
merit access to military child care.
Morris D. Davis, a retired colo-
nel and a former chief prosecutor
who quit the job in a dispute in
2007, said hurricane season was
always a concern in “trying to do a
terrorism trial on a military base
in Cuba.”“That was a novel and hercule-
an task in and of itself without
adding Covid-19 on top of it,” he
said.
Prosecutors disclosed the
Camp Justice quarantine plan
days after a key capital defense
lawyer who is new to the Sept. 11
case filed notice at the court that,
after work and travel eventually
return to normal, he would need
30 months to prepare for trial.
Complications had already cast
doubt on whether the Sept. 11 trial,
predicted to last more than a year,
would begin by the 20th anniver-
sary of the attacks, in 2021. Most
classified defense work has been
on hold since virus-related restric-
tions paralyzed travel for many of
the lawyers, who are spread
across the country.
The lawyer, David I. Bruck, 70,
one of the nation’s leading capital
defense lawyers, joined the case
in April to replace a 75-year-old
defense lawyer who left the team
representing one of the defend-ants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, for
health reasons. But Mr. Bruck,
who is based in Virginia, has not
yet received a security clearance
and has not been able to travel to
Guantánamo to meet Mr. bin al-
Shibh, who is accused of being a
deputy to Mr. Mohammed in the
Sept. 11 hijacking plot.
None of the defense lawyers
have met personally with any of
the 40 wartime detainees at Guan-
tánamo since the start of the out-
break because they are consid-
ered particularly vulnerable if
they are infected. All the detain-
ees are in their second decade of
custody and many have condi-
tions that put them at high risk, in-
cluding obesity, diabetes and high
blood pressure.
A New York City criminal de-
fense lawyer who this year shared
a six-man tent at Camp Justice to
observe a session of the case for
the American Bar Association lik-
ened the prosecution plan to a
modification of the way profes-sional sports leagues are resum-
ing games — but on a naval base in
Cuba without the testing and med-
ical care, and with greater risk
and lawyers in their 60s and 70s.
“In basketball, a guy gets sick,
they take him out and test every-
body twice in 48 hours,” said
Joshua L. Dratel, who defended a
case at the Guantánamo war court
in 2006 and 2007, when lawyers
were put up in officers’ quarters.
“What if 20 people got sick at
Camp Justice? Could the hospital
even handle it?”
The proposal for a quarantine
starting in September is part of a
flurry of efforts by the prosecutors
to resume hearings in all four ac-
tive war crimes cases after a se-
ries of setbacks and obstacles —
including an adverse court ruling
against the prosecution in a rare
case of a prisoner who has cooper-
ated with the prosecution.
The last hearing at the court
compound was held in late Febru-
ary in the case of Majid Khan, a
confessed Qaeda courier who
turned government witness in
2012 but who has yet to testify in a
single case. The judge in that case,
Col. Douglas K. Watkins, recently
rebuked prosecutors for withhold-
ing evidence and awarded Mr.
Khan a year off his ultimate sen-
tence.
Colonel Watkins accused the
government of “gamesmanship”
in the ruling on July 13, a month
after another upset to the pros-
ecution that concluded that tri-
bunal judges could award sen-
tencing credit for torture or other
abuse in U.S. military custody.
“Being accused of playing hide
the ball is pretty toxic,” said David
C. Iglesias, a retired Navy captain
who has worked as both the U.S.
attorney in New Mexico and a su-
pervising prosecutor at Guantá-
namo.Obstacles to Restarting
Trials at Guantánamo
By CAROL ROSENBERGA soldier at Guantánamo Bay’s
Camp Justice, a makeshift
compound where military
commissions are held.DOUG MILLS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESThis article was produced in part-
nership with the Pulitzer Center on
Crisis Reporting.