Moldova needs to turn its new laws on violence against women into real protection

Photo Credit: AEFL Moldova and Gender Equality Platform

UN findings back Equality Now and eight Moldovan partners: four years after ratifying the Istanbul Convention, Moldova still needs to close its child marriage exception and prosecute domestic violence as a crime.

Chișinău, Moldova, November 12, 2026: The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) has called on Moldova to eliminate every exception to the minimum marriage age of 18, to stop treating domestic violence as a minor administrative offence, and to make protection and support services reach Roma women, women with disabilities and refugee women. Its Concluding Observations, published on 2 November, take up most of the recommendations that Equality Now and Moldovan women’s rights organisations put to the Committee ahead of its review of Moldova in October.

Equality Now and Moldovan women’s rights organisations briefed the Committee on 5 October, telling it that violence against women and girls in Moldova remains widespread and that the legal reforms of recent years are not reaching survivors. Four days later the Committee questioned the Moldovan government on its record, pressing it on when it will abolish the exception that allows girls to marry from the age of 16, and when it will stop domestic violence being dealt with as an administrative matter rather than a crime. Its findings now answer both questions.

Equality Now and its partners set out their concerns in two submissions to United Nations human rights processes earlier this year. Both show the same pattern: complaints about violent crimes involving family members more than doubled, from 11,026 in 2018 to 23,727 in 2025, while convictions actually fell, from 1,919 to 1,855, in the same period.

Submissions to the CEDAW Committee and the UN UPR

In July, Equality Now, together with Moldovan partners, including Roma Women’s Platform “ROMNI”, filed a submission for Moldova’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a peer review by other UN member states. The UPR submission assesses recommendations Moldova accepted at its last review and finds that all remain only “partially implemented.”

In September, it filed another submission, to the CEDAW Committee, a body of independent experts that examined Moldova’s record at its 93rd session on 9 October, together with Association “MOTIVATIE”, the Association of Entrepreneurs with Disabilities “European Abilities Without Limits” (AEFL Moldova), Association Women in Legal Career, Family Federation for World Peace and Unification from Moldova, Femei pentru Femei, and Moldsolidaritate.

The Committee’s findings provide an important opportunity to accelerate reforms and strengthen accountability. While Moldova has taken steps to improve its legal framework, including ratifying the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention) in 2022, introducing femicide into its Criminal Code and criminalising forced marriage, significant gaps remain between legal commitments and the protection women and girls experience in practice.

Moldova must strengthen its rape law, which still falls short of a consent-based standard

Moldova changed its Criminal Code in 2022 to define rape as sexual intercourse “without consent”, an important step forward. But Article 1322 of the Criminal Code still defines the absence of consent through physical or psychological coercion, or a victim’s inability to resist or express her will, rather than the presence of free, voluntary agreement. A consent-based approach asks whether a person freely and voluntarily agreed to sexual activity, rather than requiring proof that they were physically or psychologically coerced.

In practice, based on the experience of organizations working with survivors, this evidentiary requirement can be hard to meet. Investigators and courts often place undue weight on physical injury or other signs of resistance, contributing to high dismissal rates and further harm to survivors during the justice process. The UPR submission adds that access to specialist support such as Rape Crisis Centres remains limited by funding shortfalls and gaps in training for police, medical and judicial staff.

The Committee’s findings do not address the definition of rape. Equality Now and its partners will continue to press Moldova to bring Articles 171 and 132² of the Criminal Code into line with the Istanbul Convention, including through Moldova’s Universal Periodic Review.

“Moldova took a real step forward in 2022, but the law still asks survivors to prove they were coerced rather than simply that they did not consent. Every day this gap stays open, perpetrators can walk free because a survivor froze instead of fighting back,” said Elena Ratoi, Equality Now’s Eurasia Regional Representative.

Moldova’s child marriage law leaves a legal loophole

Moldova’s Family Code sets 18 as the minimum marriage age, but allows courts to authorise marriage from age 16 for “valid reasons,” an exception the CEDAW Committee called on Moldova to remove in 2020. Amendments adopted in November 2025 further weakened safeguards by allowing a parent’s consent to enable marriage below the age of 18 where the child has at least one living parent, without the independent guardianship authority review that was previously required.

The submissions warn that removing this independent safeguard leaves children with less protection against pressure to marry. They note that parental consent is frequently the very mechanism through which girls are pressured into marriage in the first place: the one person whose agreement the law requires is often the person applying the pressure. The forced marriage offence introduced in July 2025 also covers only cases involving coercion through violence or threats of violence. This may leave forms of psychological, economic or family pressure outside the scope of the offence, while prosecutors must also prove that the perpetrator knew the victim was under 18.

The Committee has now told Moldova to amend the Family Code “to eliminate all exceptions to the minimum age of marriage of 18 years for both women and men”, and to address the root causes of child marriage among Roma girls through measures on poverty, discriminatory stereotypes and girls’ access to education.

Moldova domestic violence reports double in number while convictions fall

Reporting violence in Moldova rarely leads to anyone being held accountable. As complaints about violent crimes involving family members more than doubled between 2018 and 2025, investigations and administrative proceedings barely moved in the same period, from 2,655 to 2,722. Moreover, in 2025 courts issued 1,328 protection orders, intended to protect survivors from further violence or contact with an alleged perpetrator, still disproportionately low against the number of incidents reported. Part of the problem, the UPR submission finds, is that domestic violence can be prosecuted as either a criminal or an administrative offence with no clear rule for which applies, so cases are often reclassified as the lesser offence and closed without real accountability.

In November 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Vieru v. the Republic of Moldova that the authorities had failed to protect a woman who died after a documented history of complaints, criminal cases and protection orders that authorities failed to enforce. Moldova introduced femicide into its Criminal Code in July 2025, but the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers found in June 2026 that the authorities were still refusing to reopen the case.

We welcome the Committee’s response on this point. 

It has urged Moldova to amend the Contravention Code so that all acts of gender-based violence against women are “investigated, prosecuted and punished commensurate with their gravity”, to enforce protection orders and penalise breaches of them, and to strengthen the investigation and prosecution of femicide, including by training judges, prosecutors, police officers and forensic experts. These are the changes that would turn a doubling in complaints into a rise in accountability.

Roma, women with disabilities and refugee women face barriers to protection 

Some women and girls face more than one barrier to protection at once. Roma, Europe’s largest ethnic minority and among its most marginalised, have lived in Moldova for centuries, and Roma women and girls in particular are likely to face both sexism and anti-Roma prejudice when they seek help. A woman or a girl with a disability may depend on the very person abusing her for daily care, and a refugee woman or girl may fear that reporting violence will cost her legal status. 

“Most women with psychosocial and intellectual disabilities in Moldova never reach a service designed for victims of violence. The people who see them regularly are social workers and family doctors — and they have no protocol for identifying violence, no training, and nowhere to refer. What is not identified is never recorded,” Andrei Eșanu, Director, Family Federation for World Peace and Unification from Moldova

In Moldova, this leaves Roma women and girls, women and girls with disabilities, and refugee women and girls facing intersecting discrimination. Only 3.7% of women with disabilities who experienced violence reported being able to use a shelter, and Moldova’s state compensation mechanism for survivors has received no applications since 2018. 

Moldova hosts one of Europe’s highest refugee-to-host population ratios, sheltering around 136,000 refugees from Ukraine, most of them women and children, by the end of 2024. The analysis shows many fear that reporting violence could jeopardise their temporary protection status.

New legal provisions on technology-facilitated forms of violence took effect in February 2026, but the Committee finds their implementation so far insufficient.

The Committee has asked Moldova to remove these barriers. Its findings call for reasonable accommodation, safe housing and livelihood support “including for women with disabilities, women accompanied by children with disabilities and refugee women”; for courts and police stations that women with disabilities can use, with sign-language interpretation, easy-to-read information and support persons; and for a sustainably funded network of Roma community mediators covering the whole country.

What Equality Now and its partners are calling on Moldova to change

Equality Now and its partners welcome the Committee’s findings. The government of Moldova needs to remove every exception to marriage at 18, treat domestic violence as the crime it is, enforce protection orders, and fund services that reach Roma women, women with disabilities and refugee women. 

According to Elena Ratoi, “These recommendations reinforce what women’s rights organisations have been documenting. Legal reforms must be matched by properly resourced institutions, accessible services and effective implementation. Moldova must therefore address the gaps in its rape and child marriage laws, strengthen accountability for domestic violence, and ensure that no woman or girl is left without protection because of her disability, ethnicity, refugee status or other circumstances.”

However, two of our recommendations still need to be addressed, including a definition of rape based solely on the absence of consent, and a forced marriage offence that covers every form of coercion. Equality Now and its partners call on the government of Moldova to add these to its reform agenda.

END

Notes to editors:

For media requests, contact Natalia Krupina, Media Communications Consultant, Equality Now, E. nkrupina@equalitynow.org, T. +44 (0) 7551 441 558 (available on WhatsApp)

About: Equality Now is a worldwide human rights organisation dedicated to securing the legal and systemic change needed to end discrimination against all women and girls. Since its inception in 1992, it has played a role in reforming 140 discriminatory laws globally, positively impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of women and girls, their communities and nations, both now and for generations to come.

Working with partners at national, regional and global levels, Equality Now draws on deep legal expertise and a diverse range of social, political and cultural perspectives to continue to lead the way in steering, shaping and driving the change needed to achieve enduring gender equality, to the benefit of all. 

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