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The Istanbul Convention addresses the issues of violence against women and domestic violence in manifold ways, seeking to have women protected, offenders prosecuted, and future violence prevented. A landmark development at the intersection of human rights and domestic violence, the Convention also mandated an unprecedented protection for women: the criminalisation of psychological abuse (art.33). This article explores the challenges in criminalising this form of abuse and investigates whether (and, if so, how) Member States of the Council of Europe have complied with this obligation. A review of relevant laws reveals that, five years after the Convention came into effect, only 5 of the 14 countries that had been independently evaluated had domestic laws that prima facie comply with art.33. Even then, these laws pre-dated the Convention, and there are concerns about their construction and implementation. Countries that have failed to enact domestic laws that clearly criminalise psychological abuse typically demonstrate a limited understanding of the nature of violence against women, a failure to recognise psychological abuse as a key component of domestic violence, and have an unwarranted assumption that existing laws adequately capture and prohibit this form of abuse.
