Bulgaria will have to comply with the Istanbul Convention, even if it has not ratified it, if it is approved by the EU Council, according to the European Commission.

The European Parliament is expected to approve its ratification at its plenary session in Strasbourg on Wednesday.

This would be in line with the 2021 opinion of the Court of Justice of the European Union, according to which the EU can ratify the Istanbul Convention even if not all of its member states do so.

This means that the ratification will take place by a qualified majority and not by unanimity, the Commission specified.

Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary have not yet ratified the document. In 2018, the Bulgarian Constitutional Court accepted that it advocated legal concepts related to the concept of "gender" that were incompatible with basic principles of the Constitution.

"Article 216, paragraph 2 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union states that agreements concluded by the Union are binding on its institutions and member states," the Commission pointed out.

However, they did not answer whether there will be sanctions if Bulgaria does not implement the Convention after its ratification.

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