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Category: Life and style

  • ‘Thousands like us’: couples to take UK government to court over humanist marriages

    Exclusive: Action comes five years after lack of legal recognition for humanist marriage in England and Wales was ruled discriminatory

    Two couples are taking the government to court over its failure to legalise humanist marriage in England and Wales five years after a ruling that the lack of recognition was discriminatory.

    Engaged couples Terri O’Sullivan and Edd Berrill, from Coventry, and Nicole Shasha and Rory Booth, from Leicester, are preparing to go to court in their fight to be married in line with their humanist beliefs.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘We need to assert our power – or we’ll get trampled on’: the cleaner sacked for eating a tuna sandwich

    Gabriela Rodriguez was fired from her job over a minor misdemeanour. Now she and others like her are fighting back

    At the moment when Gabriela Rodriguez discovered she had been sacked for eating a tuna sandwich, she was carrying the bins out. Removing rubbish bags from the office in Finsbury Circus – an elegant, towering ring of neoclassical buildings that sits at the heart of London’s financial district – formed a key part of Rodriguez’s daily duties. So did wiping surfaces, scrubbing dishes in the kitchen, restocking basic supplies and all the other quietly essential activities that enable a busy workplace to function. “I’m proud of my job: it’s honest, and important, and I take it very seriously,” she says. Which is why, when the call from her manager flashed up unexpectedly on her mobile last November, nothing about it seemed to make any sense.

    “He ordered me to come back inside and hand over my security pass immediately,” she says. Rodriguez was at a loss, until the words “theft of property” were mentioned – an act of gross misconduct, and a criminal offence under English law. “That’s when it began to dawn on me,” she says, shaking her head. “This was about a leftover piece of bread. And I was going to be dismissed for it.”

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Textile zombie’ v fossil fashion: the battle to clean up the clothing industry in 2023

    There was a huge rise this year in hyperfast fashion, with its huge carbon footprint and terrible waste. But from jeans grown in Lancashire to the popularising of repairs, it’s not all bad news

    The year 2023 has been one of hyper-fast fashion, extreme price tags (both high and low), and toxic spills of polyester clothing. It was the year the zombie in the room – the sheer volume of clothing we are producing and buying – took on a life of its own.

    The connection between fossil fuels and the synthetics in our clothes really hit home. “Fossil fashion is at the core of many of fast fashion’s worst problems: cheap materials, over-reliance on synthetics, a spiralling waste crisis and spiking emissions,” said Fossil Fuel Fashion, a new organisation that launched at New York Climate Week in September, bringing together a coalition of organisations aiming to phase fossil fuels out from the industry.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Indonesia passes legislation banning sex outside marriage

    Rights groups say amended criminal code underscores shift towards fundamentalism

    Indonesia’s parliament has overhauled the country’s criminal code to outlaw sex outside marriage and curtail free speech, in a dramatic setback to freedoms in the world’s third-largest democracy.

    Passed with support from all political parties, the draconian legislation has shocked not only rights activists but also the country’s booming tourism sector, which relies on a stream of visitors to its tropical islands.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Hong Kong is strange to me now’: how five refugees are finding their new lives in Britain

    More than 88,000 Hongkongers have come to the UK under a new visa scheme after a harsh crackdown on civil liberties in the city. How are they coping? What are they doing? And do they think they will return?

    Thousands of Hongkongers escaping from China’s increasingly authoritarian grip on the city have settled in Britain over the past year in search of a new life. This fresh start comes via the British national (overseas) visa scheme.

    More than 88,000 Hongkongers applied for the BNO visa, launched last January, in its first eight months, according to Home Office figures. It allows them to live, study and work in Britain for five years. Once that time is up, BNO holders can apply to stay permanently. The government is expecting about 300,000 people to use this new route to citizenship in the next five years.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘It’s so liberating’: India’s first salon run by transgender men

    Founder Aryan Pasha wants La Beauté & Style to be an inclusive and comfortable space, as well as tackle prejudice and provide employment

    The beauty treatments listed at the new La Beauté & Style salon are much the same as those offered by the dozen or so other parlours that dot the traffic-heavy Dilshad Extension area of Ghaziabad, 17 miles (28km) east of Delhi. But that is where the similarity ends.

    The wall behind the reception desk is painted in rainbow colours; a mural of a trans man with flowing multicoloured locks decorates another wall; a woman wearing a sari is having her eyebrows plucked next to a trans man who is telling a stylist how he would like his hair cut.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • El Salvador ‘responsible for death of woman jailed after miscarriage’

    Inter-American court of human rights orders Central American country to reform harsh policies on reproductive health

    The Inter-American court of human rights has ruled that El Salvador was responsible for the death of Manuela, a woman who was jailed in 2008 for killing her baby when she suffered a miscarriage.

    The court has ordered the Central American country to reform its draconian policies on reproductive health.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Is my phone listening to me? We ask the expert

    Data protection advocate Mariano delli Santi on whether we should worry about targeted advertising

    We all believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Well, a little bit. That’s according to a Norwegian professor who recently argued that conspiratorial thinking spans everything from 5G theories to believing the referee really is against your team. Mine? I think my phone is somehow listening in. How else can I explain the ads that appear for a product just as I’m talking about it? I asked Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer with data protection advocate Open Rights Group.

    As hills to die on go, I could do worse than “my phone is listening to me”, right?
    Well, there have been fringe cases where apps have been found to turn up your mic. But the point is, advertisers don’t need to listen to know everything about you.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Abortion was legalised in Northern Ireland in 2019 – so why are we still waiting for it? | Elizabeth Nelson

    The Northern Ireland Office move to uphold our human rights is welcome. But it shouldn’t have come to this

    • Elizabeth Nelson is a writer and activist based in Belfast

    Just over two years ago I was in a pub in Belfast celebrating the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland. This heady day of vindication came after decades of campaigning by countless activists. There was a feeling of relief, not only for campaigners, but for those who have endured the trauma of being forced to travel to access basic healthcare that was readily available throughout the rest of the UK. The end was finally in sight. Our fundamental human rights would be enshrined in law, though it had taken Westminster to step in where our own government would not. At last, free, safe, legal, local abortion was imminent.

    But the promises of that day have yet to materialise. For two years the Northern Ireland Department of Health has failed to commission abortion services. Access to abortion in Northern Ireland remains piecemeal, with much of the support delivered by charities like Informing Choices NI. When they had to stop their work due to excessive pressure on resources, access to abortion again became practically nonexistent in Northern Ireland. In the midst of a once in a generation pandemic, people needing abortions – UK citizens and residents – are still forced, at personal and financial cost, to travel to Great Britain for care.

    Elizabeth Nelson is a writer and activist based in Belfast

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  • Why the witch-hunt victims of early modern Britain have come back to haunt us

    The women killed as witches centuries ago are starting to receive justice. But let’s not glamorise the murder of innocents

    Lilias Addie’s body was piled into a wooden box and buried beneath a half-tonne sandstone slab on the foreshore where a dark North Sea laps the Fife coast. More than a hundred years later, she was exhumed by opportunistic Victorian gravediggers and her bones – unusually large for a woman living in the early 18th century – were later put on show at the Empire exhibition in Glasgow. Her simple coffin was carved into a wooden walking stick – engraved “Lilias Addie, 1704” – which ended up in the collection of Andrew Carnegie, then the richest man in the world.

    It was no sort of burial, but from the perspective of the thousands of women accused of, and executed for, witchcraft in early modern Britain, Lilias’s fate had a degree of dignity.

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  • The Taliban are not the only threat to Afghanistan. Aid cuts could undo 20 years of progress

    The most vulnerable people will bear the cost of sanctions, as services and the economy collapse

    Watching Afghanistan’s unfolding trauma, I’ve thought a lot about Mumtaz Ahmed, a young teacher I met a few years ago. Her family fled Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.

    Raised as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmed had defied the odds and made it to university. Now, she was back in Afghanistan teaching maths in a rural girls’ school. “I came back because I believe in education and I love my country,” she told me. “These girls have a right to learn – without education, Afghanistan has no future.”

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Kidnapped, raped and wed against their will: Kyrgyz women’s fight against a brutal tradition

    At least 12,000 women are still abducted and forced into marriage every year in Kyrgyzstan. But pressure is growing to finally end the medieval custom

    Aisuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.

    “A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Kidnapped, raped and wed against their will: Kyrgyz women’s fight against a brutal tradition

    At least 12,000 women are still abducted and forced into marriage every year in Kyrgyzstan. But pressure is growing to finally end the medieval custom

    Aisuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.

    “A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”

    Related: Take this woman to be your wife | Kyrgyzstan

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • How public ‘apologies’ are used against domestic abuse victims in Chechnya

    Activists say Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime uses televised confessions ‘under duress’ to hold back women’s rights, despite changes in society

    Khalimat Taramova, the 22-year-old daughter of a prominent Chechen businessman, sits demurely on a velvet sofa ornately embellished in gold. She is wearing a modest dress and a headscarf. With her on the sofa are three men dressed in suits. They are appearing on Grozny TV, the state television channel of Russia’s Chechen Republic.

    Only a couple of weeks before the programme was shown on 14 June, Taramova fled her home, where she said she was subjected to violence after going against her family’s wishes. She sought help from a group of women’s rights activists, the Marem project , who let her stay in a flat owned by one of its members in the neighbouring republic of Dagestan. In a video released on social media on 6 June, she pleaded for the Chechen authorities not to come looking for her.

    If a member of a family is publicly humiliated this downgrades them and their whole family

    [Women] are more doubtful that they can ever escape the situation. They know the reach of the regime is so wide

    Related: ‘They find you and shoot you’: Chechens in fear after third Kadyrov critic killed

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The low-desire life: why people in China are rejecting high-pressure jobs in favour of ‘lying flat’

    It’s been dubbed ‘tangping’ – shunning tough careers to chill out instead. But how is the Communist party taking the birth of this new counterculture?

    Name: Low-desire life.

    Age: People – young ones especially – have been rebelling, dropping out, rejecting the rat race for pretty much ever, since the rat race began. But in China, it’s becoming more common. On trend, you might say.

    Related: How hard does China work?

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘History’s on our side’: Turkish women fighting femicide

    As Turkey quits the Istanbul convention, Gülsüm Kav’s group We Will Stop Femicide is helping keep women alive amid a rise in gender-based violence

    “History is on our side,” says Gülsüm Kav. She leans in and speaks intensely. She has a lot to say: Kav helped create Turkey’s We Will Stop Femicide (WWSF) group, and has become one of the country’s leading feminist activists even as the political environment has grown more hostile.

    Amid protests, Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul convention, the landmark international treaty to prevent violence against women and promote equality, on Thursday. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has long attacked women’s rights and gender equality, suggesting that feminists “reject the concept of motherhood”, speaking out against abortion and even caesarean sections, and claiming that gender equality is “against nature”.

    Related: Protests as Turkey pulls out of treaty to protect women

    These woman are fundamentally changing what it means to be a woman in Turkey and yet male violence is suppressing it

    Related: Murder in Turkey sparks outrage over rising violence against women

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Peter Tatchell’s life on film: ‘So far I’ve been violently assaulted 300 times’

    Peter Tatchell has protested against everyone from Mike Tyson to Tony Blair. So what did the human rights campaigner make of the Netflix documentary Hating Peter Tatchell?

    The title of Hating Peter Tatchell was the brainchild of its director, Christopher Amos. When, in 2015, he first became interested in making a documentary about my 54 years of LGBTQ+ and other human rights activism, he was taken aback by the volume and ferocity of hatred against me.

    So far I’ve been violently assaulted over 300 times, had 50 attacks on my flat, been the victim of half a dozen murder plots and received tens of thousands of hate messages and death threats over the last five decades, mostly from homophobes and far-right extremists. Amos envisaged a film that documented how and why my campaigns generated such extreme hatred.

    The writer is the director of Peter Tatchell Foundation. Hating Peter Tatchell is out now on Netflix.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Bodies are being eaten by hyenas; girls of eight raped’: inside the Tigray conflict

    A nun working in war-torn Tigray has shared her harrowing testimony of the atrocities taking place

    The Ethiopian nun, who has to remain anonymous for her own security, is working in Mekelle, Tigray’s capital, and surrounding areas, helping some of the tens of thousands of people displaced by the fighting who have been streaming into camps in the hope of finding shelter and food. Both are in short supply. Humanitarian aid is being largely blocked and a wholesale crackdown is seeing civilians being picked off in the countryside, either shot or rounded up and taken to overcrowded prisons. She spoke to Tracy McVeigh this week.

    “After the last few months I’m happy to be alive. I have to be OK. Mostly we are going out to the IDP [internally displaced people] camps and the community centres where people are. They are in a bad way.

    Related: Ethiopian patriarch pleads for international help to stop rape and genocide by government troops

    Related: ‘I saw people dying on the road’: Tigray’s traumatised war refugees

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Rape is being used as weapon of war in Ethiopia, say witnesses

    Ethiopian nun speaks of widespread horror she and colleagues are seeing on a daily basis inside the heavily isolated region of Tigray

    Thousands of women and girls are being targeted by the deliberate tactic of using rape as a weapon in the civil war that has erupted in Ethiopia, according to eyewitnesses.

    In a rare account from inside the heavily isolated region of Tigray, where communications with the outside world are being deliberately cut off, an Ethiopian nun has spoken of the widespread horror she and her colleagues are seeing on a daily basis since a savage war erupted six months ago.

    Related: The Guardian view on the war in Ethiopia: Tigray’s civilians need protection | Editorial

    Related: Ethiopia: 1,900 people killed in massacres in Tigray identified

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Home Office sued by asylum seeker over baby’s death

    Woman claims asylum housing staff ignored pleas for help when she was in pain while 35 weeks pregnant

    A woman whose baby died is suing the Home Office for negligence over claims that staff at her asylum accommodation refused to call an ambulance when she was pregnant and bleeding.

    The woman, who has asked to be named Adna, sought asylum in the UK in January 2020 after fleeing Chad. She was seven months pregnant when she was brought by police to Brigstock House asylum-support accommodation in Croydon.

    Related: ‘I felt humiliated’: parents respond to NHS maternity care racial bias inquiry

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Charities warn over ‘frightening’ plan to put plainclothes police in nightclubs

    Scheme distracts from rightful criticisms of police response to Clapham vigil, campaigners say

    Plans to protect women by putting plainclothes police officers in nightclubs are bizarre, frightening and “spectacularly missing the point”, campaigners and charities have said.

    The plans were outlined by the government as part of the steps it was taking to improve security and protect women from predatory offenders. Called Project Vigilant, the programme can involve officers attending areas around clubs and bars in plainclothes, along with increased police patrols as people leave at closing time.

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Grief, anger and a curfew as Pakistani activist Karima Baloch buried

    Family of women’s rights advocate, found dead in Canadian lake, call for police to reopen investigation

    It was the homecoming they never wanted. Five years ago, Karima Baloch fled Pakistan after her work as a prominent human rights activist put her life in danger. On Sunday morning, on the tarmac of Karachi airport, she was returned to her family at last.

    But though she lay lifeless in a wooden coffin, her body was confiscated by Pakistani security officials for hours. Then her home town in Balochistan was placed under the control of paramilitary forces, a curfew was imposed on the region and mobile services were suspended, all to prevent thousands turning out for her funeral on Monday. It was clear that, even in death, Pakistan viewed Baloch as a threat to national security.

    Related: Pakistan: where the daily slaughter of women barely makes the news | Mohammed Hanif

    Video: Relatives & close family friends were allowed to participate in the last funeral prayers of #KarimaBaloch. The huge participation of local women can also be seen in this video. People across the Balochistan were not allowed to farewell their leader.@Gulalai_Ismail pic.twitter.com/mTw6iP3rJG

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.