By the end of the year, the authorities had made no progress in establishing the fate of over 11,500 people disappeared during the armed conflicts in the Balkans. Victims of enforced disappearance and their families continued to be denied access to justice, truth and reparation. Nominal improvements in the laws regulating reparation for victims of wartime sexual violence continued to be made in several countries. DISCRIMINATION THE “TRADITIONAL VALUES” PRETENCE IN EASTERN EUROPE AND IN CENTRAL ASIA Governments across Eastern Europe and across Central Asia continued to prop up repression and discrimination by promoting and increasingly invoking the rhetoric of a discriminatory interpretation of so-called “traditional values”. The “traditional values” referred to were selective xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic interpretations of cultural values. In Tajikistan, this discourse and its application was used to punish LGBTI communities for “amoral” behaviours and enforce “norms” for dress code, language and religion primarily against women and religious minorities, including through new legislation. In Kazakhstan and Russia, there was an increasing number of criminal prosecutions and other harassment of religious minorities, on arbitrary grounds, under “anti-extremism” legislation. The said interpretation assertion of “traditional values” reached a terrifying dimension with the secret torture and killing of gay men in Chechnya by authorities. WOMEN’S RIGHTS Following sexual harassment allegations against US Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and others in the show business industry, millions of women worldwide used the online hashtag #MeToo to break the silence about their experiences as survivors of sexual violence. This became a rallying cry for challenging victim blaming and holding offenders to account. The year also saw the women’s and feminist movements mobilizing thousands – including during January’s Women’s Marches across Europe, and Black Monday protests in Poland that successfully pushed the government not to further restrict access to safe and legal abortion. Yet, throughout Europe and Central Asia, women and girls continued to experience systemic human rights violations and abuses, including torture and other ill-treatment, denial of the right to health and bodily autonomy, inequality of opportunity, and widespread gender-based violence. Access to abortion remained criminalized in most circumstances in Ireland and Northern Ireland and severely restricted in practice. In Poland, there were systemic barriers in accessing safe and legal abortion. Abortion remained criminalized in all circumstances in Malta. The EU and Moldova signed the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention). It was ratified by Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Germany, Norway and Switzerland – bringing to 28 the number of states to have done so. Ukraine signed it in 2011 but failed to ratify the Convention. Despite increasingly strong legislative protections, gender-based violence against women remained pervasive, including in Albania, Croatia and Romania. In Russia, under the cover of the so-called “traditional values” narrative, and encountering little public criticism, the Parliament adopted legislation decriminalizing some forms of domestic violence which President Putin signed into law. In Norway and Sweden, gender-based violence, including sexual violence, remained a serious problem with inadequate state response. 52 Amnesty International Report 2017/18