Turkey's Law No. 6284 and the ALO 183 Hotline — Rising Protection Orders, Persistent Enforcement Gaps

Turkey's Law No. 6284 on the Protection of Family and Prevention of Violence against Women (2012) empowers police, prosecutors and courts to issue preventive orders against perpetrators and protective orders for survivors, for up to six months, drawing partly on the Council of Europe's Istanbul Convention framework. The 24/7 ALO 183 social-support hotline, run by the Ministry of Family and Social Services, is one of the law's main access points, taking reports of violence and coordinating protection-order requests.

Justice Ministry data cited by Human Rights Watch shows use of the law rising sharply: preventive orders climbed from 139,218 in 2016 to 272,870 in 2021, and protective orders from 1,801 to 10,401 over the same period.

However, independent monitoring finds the rising order volumes have not translated into safety. Human Rights Watch's 2022 report documents courts routinely failing to sanction breaches, and records that of 307 women killed in 2021, 38 held an active protective order at the time of their death. The civil-society femicide monitor 'We Will Stop Femicide' recorded 394 women killed in 2024, the highest annual total since tracking began, even as Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention in 2021 under political pressure to weaken the law.

UN Women partnered with the Ministry of Justice (2022-2023) to produce an implementation guide for judges and prosecutors aimed at closing these enforcement gaps. The law and hotline remain in force, making this a case where a well-designed legal instrument exists and is heavily used, but has not yet delivered the protective outcome it was built for -- a caution against equating order volume with survivor safety.

Read the full analysis: https://eca.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2024/07/implementation-guide-law-no-6284