FAU CHREN Human Rights Colloquium: „The implications of Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention“ with Dr. Janina Heaphy

This FAU CHREN Human Rights Colloquium will be held on 14 January 2026 from 6:15 to 7:30 pm and will feature Dr. Janina Heaphy as speaker.

The session analyses Turkey’s democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation, with particular attention the country’s systematic violation of core international norms, including fundamental human rights obligations. Drawing on several interconnected research projects, the session particularly zooms in on  Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention highlighting how this withdrawal forms part of a wider strategy of stigma balancing, enabling Ankara to navigate its multi-vectoral foreign-policy between Russia and Europe while reframing both domestic and international norm commitments. Moreover, the session assesses the withdrawal’s consequences for the Council of Europe and the broader implications for the resilience of human-rights institutions under conditions of geopolitical tensions and democratic erosion.

 Speaker bio: Janina Heaphy works as a senior researcher at the FAU Center for Human Rights (CHREN), where she researches and teaches foreign policy analysis, human rights, diplomacy, and security studies. In her doctoral thesis, Janina Heaphy examined the emergence of extraterritorial human rights protections in American, British, and German counterterrorism efforts and has since researched various accountability mechanisms  as well as state strategies for avoiding said accountability in light of international norm violations. Her articles have been published in the European Journal of International Relations, as well as in Policy&Politics, Cooperation and Conflict, and Perspectives on Politics. She is a co-editor of the Journal of Human Rights (zfmr). In the course of her academic career, Janina Heaphy has worked as a lecturer and research assistant at the universities of Leiden, Bamberg, Munich (LMU), and Aston University Birmingham. She is currently working on her ‘Habilitation’ at the Chair of Human Rights Policy.

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☑️ RSVP

If you are planning to attend, please reserve a place by email to nathalie.schneider@fau.de and eva.m.pils@fau.de