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Category: Women

  • ‘Nowhere to go’: divorced Afghan women in peril as the Taliban close in

    As horror stories emerge from areas that have fallen to the Islamist militants, women living alone fear they have no route of escape

    There’s an old saying in Afghanistan that encapsulates the country’s views on divorce: “A woman only leaves her father’s house in the white bridal clothes, and she can only return in the white shrouds.”

    In this deeply conservative and patriarchal society, women who defy convention and seek divorce are often disowned by their families and shunned by Afghan society. Left alone, they have to fight for basic rights, such as renting an apartment, which require the involvement or guarantees of male relatives.

    As provinces and cities fall under Taliban control across Afghanistan, women’s voices are already being silenced. For this special series, the Guardian’s Rights and freedom project has partnered with Rukhshana Media, a collective of female journalists across Afghanistan, to bring their stories of how the escalating crisis is affecting the lives of women and girls to a global audience.

    I left my family with only the clothes I was wearing. I got into a taxi to Kabul and never looked back

    Related: ‘I worry my daughters will never know peace’: women flee the Taliban – again

    ​Now more than ever, Afghan women need a platform to speak for themselves. As the Taliban’s return haunts Afghanistan, the survival of Rukhshana Media depends on ​readers’ help.​ To continue reporting​ ​over ​the next crucial year, ​it is trying to raise $20,000.​ If you can help, go to ​this crowdfunding page.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Conference Conversations: Interrogating Our Self-Image as a Champion of Gender Equality

    Conference Conversations is a 3-part blog series based on papers from key speakers at the Castan Centre Human Rights Law Conference 2021, which took place on Friday 23 July this year. The first blog in this series is based on a paper presented by the author, Dr Tania Penovic, in session one of the conference on ‘Confronting Persistent Gender Inequality and Harnessing Women’s Voices’.

    By Tania Penovic 

    Australia’s current level of engagement with the UN human rights system is perhaps unprecedented. We have two representatives on human rights treaty bodies and two experts serving on mandates of the Human Rights Council. All four of these individuals are women and on the world stage, we have presented ourselves as a leader in advancing gender equality. My paper will interrogate this self-image by looking at our international engagement and considering the way it is reflected at home. 

    Our recent history of engagement

    Our engagement has not always been constructive. It took a combative turn two decades ago, largely in response to findings of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on discrimination against Indigenous Australians. The Committee was said to have ‘failed to grapple with [our] unique and complex history of race relations’1 and castigated for its reliance on information from civil society rather than the more airbrushed image presented by Australia. Then Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer declared that ‘[i]f a United Nations committee wants to play domestic politics here in Australia, it will end up with a bloody nose.’ 

    We disengaged to a degree with treaty bodies, resisted international visits2 and refused to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) on the basis that Australia already has a ‘world class regime of legal and institutional mechanisms to protect women against discrimination’.3

    Dianne Otto observed that this exceptionalist stance rests on the claim that our exemplary human rights record exempts us from having to respond seriously to the concerns of an international system which should be focused on undemocratic states (them) rather than us. 

    Resistance to human rights scrutiny has been reflected in hostility directed towards NGOs and former Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs in the context of our seemingly intractable asylum seeker policy. Reports from UN special rapporteurs have been disparaged as lectures that ‘Australians are sick of’ or ‘the kind of nonsense we are used to from these armchair critics.’ But more recently, we have welcomed visits from these special procedures of the Human Rights Council and hosted visits by five special rapporteurs with a further three postponed due to COVID-19. We have sought election and served a three-year term on the Human Rights Council, fuelling speculation about a shift in our engagement with the UN system and a greater commitment to domestic implementation. 

     A retreat from exceptionalism?

    In examining whether Australia’s engagement has shifted from the exceptionalism of the past, I will apply the lens of rituals and ritualism drawn from sociology, anthropology and regulatory theory by Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking and applied to participation in the UN system. Charlesworth and Larking have described rituals are ‘ceremonies or formalities that, through repetition, entrench the understandings and the power relationships they embody’, a ‘means of enacting a social consensus.’4 Ritualism involves embracing human rights language and garnering the legitimacy associated with human rights commitments while, or even as a means of, deflecting scrutiny and avoiding accountability.5  

    So rituals encompass the processes of engagement with the human rights system, including the processes of reporting periodically to treaty bodies and the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review, responding to the recommendations emanating from these processes and engaging in international political negotiations.  

    I will consider whether Australia’s engagement is marked by human rights ritualism by examining our recent participation in the rituals of the UN human rights system and then considering whether this has translated into a commitment to the advancement of gender equality at home.    

    The rituals of engagement 

    A foundational ritual of UN engagement is treaty ratification. And despite previous its earlier refusal, Australia has ratified CEDAW’s Optional Protocol. In recent years, it has also ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, its Optional Protocol, two Optional Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and, after significant delay, the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. 

    A focal point of our international engagement has been our recent term on the UN’s key intergovernmental body responsible for human rights, the Human Rights Council. In our bid for membership, we promised a principled but practical approach built on five pillars which represent areas in which we claimed to be positioned to advance human rights and to be leaders in promoting improvements. The first pillar is gender equality. 

    Our leadership in this regard derives from a foreign aid strategy introduced by our first female Foreign Affairs Minister and continued under our second. At least 80% of development investments are dedicated to gender issues, including violence against women and women’s empowerment. This significant commitment to gender equality abroad has yet to be matched with a broad-based gender policy at home. Susan Harris Rimmer and Marian Sawer have observed a longstanding tendency to champion our achievements in foreign policy while deflecting attention from the gendered impact of the ‘neoliberal reshaping of the welfare state’ in the form of shrinking public sector funding6 which may be seen, for example, in the chronic underfunding of the Office for Women. 

    During our final year on the Human Rights Council, we commenced a four-year term on the Commission on the Status of Women, the UN’s principal intergovernmental body dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment. At its 65th session in March 2021, Australia engaged actively in the rituals of membership, serving as Vice-Chair of its Bureau. Our national statement to the session was delivered by Senator Marise Payne at around about the same time that thousands of people marched across Australia for gender justice. 

    The statement noted the gendered impact of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of targeted measures for increasing women’s full, equal and meaningful participation and leadership in public life. It affirmed Australia’s commitment to the Security Council’s Women Peace and Security Agenda. It observed that women’s wellbeing and ability to participate in public life is inextricably linked to achieving women’s economic empowerment, and end to gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health and rights. And it declared Australia’s commitment to ‘advancing women’s leadership at all levels and in all areas of our lives, free from discrimination and violence.’ In the performative rituals of membership and participation in key intergovernmental bodies concerned with human rights, Australia presents as champion of gender equality. For observers unapprised of events at home, Australia may indeed appear to have eliminated gender-based discrimination.     

    Nominating experts

    A further ritual of engagement has been Australia’s nomination of a number of human rights experts to thematic mechanisms and treaty bodies. 

    First, Megan Davis currently serves on the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which advises the Human Rights Council. Her contribution to the UN human rights system is broad and significant. She has served as a member and chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and participated in drafting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. At home, Professor Davis has played an important role in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.   

    Second, Australia’s former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick was appointed in 2017 to the Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls, a body created by the Human Rights Council to address the failure of states to realise the commitment made at the Fourth World Conference on Women to revoke discriminatory laws. During Broderick’s tenure, the working group has undertaken important work to highlight the gendered impacts of laws and practices and advocated for the reform of discriminatory laws. 

    Third, Rosemary Kayess was elected to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2019 and now serves as chair. Kayess was involved in the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and lobbying for its ratification by Australia. She is the first Australian woman and second Australian to serve on the committee, with Ron McCallum having served two terms between 2009 and 2014. Australia’s nomination for her re-election was recently announced. 

    Finally, for the first time in almost three decades, the CEDAW Committee has an Australian member. Natasha Stott Despoja commenced her term in January after an election campaign conducted largely online. Stott Despoja will build on an important legacy. Her predecessor, Elizabeth Evatt served on the committee from 1984 until 1992 and chaired it from 1989-1991. Evatt helped achieve important procedural reforms to the Committee’s processes and played a critical role in the normative expansion of the prohibition of gender-based violence, promoting the understanding that violence in the private sphere is a violation of human rights.7 

    In a media release congratulating Stott Despoja on her election, Senator Marise Payne links the government’s support for the election of an Australian to the committee as a corollary of ‘Australia’s proud record of advocacy on gender equality’, building on our global leadership on gender equality and commitment to eliminating discrimination against women and girls in Australia and globally. I will now consider that commitment in Australia.   

    From the international to the domestic 

    So has our high-level engagement in UN rituals, including the nomination of leading experts, marked a retreat from the exceptionalist premise that the system is designed for others and not for us?  Or is it a manifestation of human rights ritualism? The answer lies in our stance towards domestic implementation, the degree to which we have embraced the standards that underpin our international engagement. 

    In recent years, recommendations by bodies such as the CEDAW Committee and Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women have been received politely, without public contestation. But many are not implemented and we have failed to manifest a commitment to the kind of transformative change needed to advance gender equality in Australia. 

    When UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet visited Australia in 2019, she revealed a significant understanding of Australia’s progress in achieving gender equality: 

    ‘Australia has a significantly better track record than many other countries, but still women continue to face many barriers, including unequal pay, workplace discrimination and pervasive sexual harassment. And I have heard for a long time about the exceptionally misogynistic approach to women politicians by many men in Australian political life, and elsewhere in society.’

    The ‘misogynistic approach’ referred to by the High Commissioner has been well ventilated in recent months and much has been said about Australia’s cultural ‘moment.’ But we are yet to see a sincere commitment to the transformative change needed to address sexual harassment, discrimination and gender-based violence. 

    The implementation of CEDAW requires states to combat gender stereotypes in the family and society and the CEDAW Committee has called on Australia to develop a comprehensive strategy to overcome discriminatory stereotypes. But we do not need to look much further than the treatment of women in political office to understand that stereotypes pervade our society and require so much more than an hour-long optional training session to dismantle. Female politicians are routinely depicted as housewives, housekeepers, child carers, school girls, head girls, headmistresses or weather girls, shamed for being deliberately barren, man-hating shrews, or outsourcing their parenting responsibilities. 

    Research undertaken by Blair Williams has found gender stereotyping in the media has intensified over time. Gender is often the primary descriptor of female politicians8, and significant attention paid to clothes, body shape, partners, families and childcare arrangements.9 ‘Celebritised’ depictions of female politicians have come with expectations about grooming and appearance, positioning ‘sartorial style as central’, making women ‘seem ‘other’ to their political role’10 and ‘detract[ing] from their reputation as serious political actors.’11

    This type of attention came into sharp focus during the leadership of our first and only female Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Even Germaine Greer weighed in on Gillard’s clothing choices with reference to her body shape, providing a license to others to weaponise the very tropes Greer has worked to dismantle. 

    Gillard received a lot more than gendered wardrobe advice. She was the subjected to intense hostility and gender-based mockery,12 described by Anne Summers as a manifestation of institutionalised resistance to women’s equality, rooted in entrenched assumptions about women’s full participation in Australian society.13 

    With her inquiry into Parliament House culture underway, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins has a gargantuan task ahead. And there are many dark spots in Australia’s gender equality picture beyond the government’s failure to manifest the commitment necessary to change Australia’s culture of sexual violence and discrimination. These include the federal government’s failure to accept the Respect@Work report’s most transformative recommendation, requiring positive measures from employers to eliminate sexual harassment, discrimination and victimisation. 

    They include the imminent absorption of the Family Court of Australia into the Federal Circuit Court in the face of warnings by a preponderance of experts that the loss of a specialist court is likely to expose women to gendered harm.  

    They include the re-emergence of ‘religious freedoms’ on the government’s legislative agenda. UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Ahmed Shaheed, whose mandate is focused on dismantling obstacles to religious freedoms, has cautioned against the enactment of such laws on the basis that they undermine gender equality and legitimise violations of fundamental rights. In a report to the Human Rights Council, he observed that similar laws have served as a rationale for the dismissal of pregnant employees for being unmarried; the denial of access to (and insurance coverage for) legal reproductive health services and refusals to discharge prescriptions for contraception.  

    Reports that religious freedoms will be an election issue raise the disturbing prospect of a radical departure from the standards we champion to the world. The enactment of such laws would not facilitate constructive engagement with the UN, or help Australia advance gender equality at home, in our region and beyond. 

    Facing our ritualism 

    Hilary Charlesworth and Gillian Triggs have observed Australia to be Janus-faced; with one face looking to the UN and championing human rights elsewhere while the other looks inwards and fails to implement human rights principles at home. When we consider Australia’s domestic implementation of the international standards it champions on the world stage, the ritualistic face is revealed. 

    The power of participating in rituals in which we position ourselves as a leader has yet to translate to a deeper commitment to advancing gender equality and accountability for violations of women’s human rights. Significant work remains to be done to bring our implementation of international norms into line with our vainglorious view of ourselves.  

    References

    1. Daryl Williams, Attorney-General, ‘CERD Report Unbalanced’ (Press Release, 26 March 2000).
    2.  Alexander Downer, Daryl Williams and Philip Ruddock, ‘Improving the effectiveness of United Nations Committees’ (Joint Media release, 29 August 2000). 
    3. Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, ‘Minister’s Reply’ [to letter from Professor Maddocks] (2000) 147 UNity News 2.
    4.  Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking, ‘Introduction: the regulatory power of the Universal Periodic Review’in Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking, Human rights and the Universal Periodic Review: Rituals and Ritualism (Cambridge University Press, 2014) 8. 
    5.  Ibid, 18. 
    6. Susan Harris Rimmer and Marian Sawer, ‘Neoliberalism and Gender Equality Policy in Australia’,(2016) 51(4) Australian Journal of Political Science 742, 753-754.
    7.  Evatt was a driving force behind the Committee’s first comprehensive statement on violence against women, General Recommendation 19. The statement recognised gender-based violence as a form of discrimination within the ambit of CEDAW and has been built upon by a General Assembly declaration and the work of thematic mandates of the Human Rights Council, regional human rights bodies and the CEDAW Committee’s views and inquiries under CEDAW’s Optional Protocol. In 2017, General Recommendation 19 was updated by the more comprehensive General Recommendation 35 which affirms the position that the prohibition on gender-based violence had evolved into a principle of customary international law. 
    8.  Blair Williams, ‘A Tale of Two Women: A Comparative Gendered Media Analysis of UK Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, Parliamentary Affairs (2021) 74, 398–420; Blair Williams, ’A gendered media analysis of the prime ministerial ascension of Gillard and Turnbull: he’s ‘taken back the reins’ and she’s ‘a backstabbing’ murderer’, (2017) Australian Journal of Political Science, 52:4, 550-564, DOI: 10.1080/10361146.2017.1374347, 558. 
    9.  Ibid, Blair Williams, ‘It’s a man’s world at the top: gendered media representations of Julia Gillard and Helen Clark, (2020) Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2020.1842482
    10.  Blair Williams, A tale of Two Women’ note 8 above, 413. 
    11.  Ibid 411. 
    12.  See generally Samantha Trenoweth (ed), Bewitched and Bedevilled: Women Write the Gillard Years (Hardie Grant, Melbourne, 2013).  
    13. Anne Summers, The Misogyny Factor (NewSouth, Sydney, 2013) 19-21; see also Helen Pringle, ‘The Pornification of Julia Gillard’, in Samantha Trenoweth (ed), Bewitched and Bedevilled: Women Writethe Gillard Years (Hardie Grant, Melbourne, 2013)

    Dr Tania Penovic is a Senior Lecturer, and Deputy Associate Dean (International) in the Faculty of Law at Monash University. She is also the Research Program Group Leader in Gender and Sexuality for the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law.

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    This post was originally published on Castan Centre for Human Rights Law.

  • Women supported to start new careers in welding under skills plan to expand Attack Class submarine workforce

    Naval Group Australia has developed a new program which aims to boost female participation in the Attack Class submarine project by offering work-ready skills training to assist more women to take up a career in welding. In partnership with the Government of South Australia’s Skilling South Australia initiative and Adelaide Training and Employment Centre, Naval […]

    The post Women supported to start new careers in welding under skills plan to expand Attack Class submarine workforce appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Serious questions raised by solitary confinement in prisons | Letters

    Emma Ginn and Annie Viswanathan on the effect of solitary confinement on immigration detainees and Dean Kingham on prisoners abandoned to close supervision centres

    Prolonged solitary confinement is an extreme form of treatment, prohibited in all circumstances under international law. Your article (Fifty-two prisoners in close supervision units ‘that may amount to torture’, 26 July) exposed this practice in highly restrictive prisons.

    Prolonged solitary confinement has in fact become routine in all prisons during the pandemic, with many individuals being confined alone or with a cellmate for 22 to 24 hours each day since March 2020.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Kicked to the kerb: The crisis of older women becoming homeless

    After a lifetime of raising children and contributing to the country’s wealth, women are being hung out to dry by state and federal governments. Suzanne James interviewed Beverly Baker, NSW Chair of Older Women’s Network about the urgent need for change.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Will the new super changes be enough?

    While the changes to superannuation have been welcomed by many, workers in the gig economy and women remain at risk of being left behind. Suzanne James reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • INADEQUACY OF LAWS AGAINST CROSS-BORDER SEX TRAFFICKING OF NEPALI GIRLS

    By Ayush Kumar, this was first published by RightsViews on the 8th of July Globalisation has caused the emergence of new technologies that facilitate trading and transport making business more rewarding. This change had negative ramifications too, one is cross-boundary human trafficking. After arms and drugtrafficking, human trafficking is the third-largest crime in magnitude and profit. There are … Continue reading INADEQUACY OF LAWS AGAINST CROSS-BORDER SEX TRAFFICKING OF NEPALI GIRLS

    This post was originally published on Human Rights centre blog.

  • 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

    Continue reading…

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

  • Australia’s second pandemic — gendered violence

    A second pandemic is lurking in the shadows of COVID-19 — the pandemic of femicide and violence against women. Markela Panegyres looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic is fuelling an upsurge of domestic and family violence, including coercive control and sexual violence.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Allegations of historical sexual assault in parliament will not be investigated

    Scott Morrison says the government is taking sexual assault seriously, but how can it when it is not going to investigate historical complaints? Sonia Hickey reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Big support shown for library workers’ pay and conditions campaign

    Geelong Library and Heritage Centre workers walked off the job on July 2 as part of a rolling campaign of protected industrial action for better pay and conditions. Adele Welsh and Sue Bull report.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • ‘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

    Continue reading…

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

  • Gender rights in Western Sahara: Will future generations of Saharawi women maintain their position as ‘owners of the tent’?

    By Danielle Smith In Saharawi society, married women are described as the “mutKhayima”, literally translated as “the owner of the tent”.  This means even when a man is married, the tent exclusively belongs to his wife and she can kick him out at any time if she is displeased with him. Who are the Saharawi? … Continue reading Gender rights in Western Sahara: Will future generations of Saharawi women maintain their position as ‘owners of the tent’?

    This post was originally published on Human Rights centre blog.

  • Australia talks but will politicians listen?

    The ABC’s Australia Talks National Survey was released on June 21 with a special TV event hosted by journalist Annabel Crab and comedian Nazeem Hussein.

    While the questions can be, and were, framed to elicit specific responses, the survey results are interesting in so far as they provide a snap shot of opinion on some important (and some less so) topics. For social change activists it’s food for thought.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Radicals remember the 1960s

    Jim McIlroy reviews a new anthology of lively interviews with prominent figures in the Australian radical youth scene of the 1960s.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Iran’s Komala: Guns and social democratic roses

    An exclusive report from Iraqi Kurdistan’s Zirgwezala by Marcel Cartier.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Sadia Hussein: the FGM survivor who is saving girls from the knife

    Being cut, aged 10, led to extraordinary pain and complications in childbirth. Now Hussein’s campaign to end mutilation has led to a staggering change in attitudes

    Sadia Hussein had been in labour for three days when she felt she could take no more. She could hear her mother crying in the distance, pleading with God to save her daughter’s life.

    But even though things were clearly not progressing as they should have been, the women in her small Kenyan village were resistant to the idea of sending her to hospital. Her mother told her that doctors would “tear her apart” with a pair of scissors; that, at home, they could at least use a razor. “So now, on top of the overwhelming pain of labour, there was this continuous cutting,” Hussein recalls.

    I said ‘You are my mother, but you are not the mother of my daughter. I will decide what should happen to my daughter’

    The day of circumcision, the wedding night, and the birth of a baby
    Are the three feminine sorrows!
    I cry for help as my battered flesh tears.
    No mercy. Push! They say,
    It is only feminine pain,
    And feminine pain perishes.

    A mother can call the radio, and say: ‘I gave birth to 15 kids and I never saw all the complications you’re talking about.’ I will still know how to challenge her

    Related: Kenyan efforts to end FGM suffer blow with victims paraded in ‘open defiance’

    Related: ‘On a rampage’: the African women fighting to end FGM

    Continue reading…

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

  • Ny Nourn: the woman convicted of murder and pardoned – who now fights for other battered women

    Nourn moved from Cambodia to the US as a child, and ended up in an abusive relationship that led to a man’s murder. After years in prison, she is now a powerful voice for those who face incarceration and deportation

    When Ny Nourn entered Central California Women’s Facility, the largest women’s prison in the world, there was every reason to believe she would never walk free on American soil again.

    She was just 21, and had been sentenced to “life without parole” for her part in a hauntingly brutal murder – a part she was forced into. Even if, at some distant date, a successful appeal commuted that sentence, her conviction made Nourn deportable – so when she had served her time, she was likely to be transported to another prison and ultimately to Cambodia, the country of her parents’ birth, a country she had never set foot in.

    Ron used to say: ‘I should have killed you that night I killed him,’ and a part of me wished he had

    Now I see that we were two Asian defendants accused of killing a white man. Looking back, I had no chance

    Continue reading…

    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.

    Continue reading…

    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

    Continue reading…

    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

    Continue reading…

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

  • China’s feminists protest against wave of online abuse with ‘internet violence museum’

    A growing nationalistic fervour is fuelling a torrent of vitriol against anyone speaking out against the state, especially women’s rights activists

    Late last month, an “unknown hill in the Chinese desert” was blanketed in scores of large red and white banners, flapping vitriol in the breeze. “I hope you die, bitch,” said one. “Little bitch, screw the feminists,” said others.

    They were all actual messages sent to women, a direct act of harassment anonymised by social media. They were sent during weeks of intense debate about the treatment of women on platforms such as Weibo, sparked by the abuse of Xiao Meili who posted video of a man who threw hot liquid at her after she asked him to stop smoking.

    Some artists and activists established a temporary physical “Internet Violence Museum” to show how online violence on the Internet in China brutally attacked feminists. This project responded to the recent persecution of feminists by nationalist trolls and major online platforms. pic.twitter.com/PbNVbtH98a

    Related: The Chinese government is trying to rebrand forced sterilization as feminism | Arwa Mahdawi

    Every time nationalistic sentiment runs high, a woman is cyberbullied, from Fang Fang to Tzu-i Chuang, from Vicky Xu to Xiao Meili. Ethnic Chinese women are seen as theState’s property; whenever they’re deemed to have strayed from patriarchal values, they are damned. https://t.co/cwlRolETQU

    Continue reading…

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

  • Female political prisoners in Iran facing ‘psychological torture’, say campaigners

    Reports of deteriorating treatment of human rights activists, with an increase in moves to ‘dangerous’ jails often far from families

    Female human rights activists imprisoned in Iran face increased jail terms and transfers to prisons with “dangerous and alarming” conditions, hundreds of miles away from their families, according to campaigners.

    Warnings of the deteriorating treatment of female prisoners in Iran come days after Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian national who has served a five-year prison sentence in Iran, was sentenced to a further year in jail and a year-long travel ban by the Iranian courts.

    Related: ‘We’re treated as children,’ Qatari women tell rights group

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

  • The Women Of The Warrior Met Strike

    Alabama – Just 40 miles to the west of where Amazon workers at the BHM1 facility in Bessemer, Alabama, were voting on whether to form a union, 1,100 mine workers at Warrior Met Coal in Brookwood began a strike for a fair contract and better working conditions. The strike is now entering its third week, and already the workers have surmounted their first significant obstacle: they voted overwhelmingly to reject a wretched deal presented by the company, one that many workers called “a slap in the face.” The tentative agreement (TA) presented by UMWA union representatives and the company fails to address the workers’ most important concerns: wages, job security, and paid time off. In response, the miners tore up the TA and returned to the picket lines, determined to force the company to offer a better contract.

    The post The Women Of The Warrior Met Strike appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Seyran Ateş: ‘I’m not a traitor – I’m fighting for progressive Islam’

    A new film documents the life and faith of the Turkish-German human rights lawyer and advocate of liberal Muslim worship

    For Seyran Ateş, restrictions on daily life as a result of the Covid pandemic have had little impact. The Turkish-German human rights lawyer and advocate for progressive Islam has been unable to move freely for 15 years because of death threats. “I’m surprised people feel so frustrated over just a few weeks or months,” she says with a smile.

    Ateş has been under police protection since 2006 because of the risk to her life from extreme Islamists, Turkish-Kurdish nationalists and German rightwing extremists. Two fatwas have been issued against her and she is accused of being a terrorist by the Erdoğan government in Turkey.

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

  • ‘Kill the bill’ and trans visibility: human rights this fortnight in pictures

    A round-up of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to China

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

  • Hidden human rights crises threaten post-Covid global security – Amnesty

    ‘Crises will multiply’ if escalating repression by governments under pretext of pandemic ignored, says secretary general

    Neglected human rights crises around the world have the potential to undermine already precarious global security as governments continue to use Covid as a cover to push authoritarian agendas, Amnesty International has warned.

    The organisation said ignoring escalating hotspots for human rights violations and allowing states to perpetrate abuses with impunity could jeopardise efforts to rebuild after the pandemic.

    A year on from the start of the world’s biggest health crisis, we now face a human rights pandemic. Covid-19 has exposed the inequalities and fragilities of health and political systems and allowed authoritarian regimes to impose drastic curbs on rights and freedoms, using the virus as a pretext for restricting free speech and stifling dissent.

    Related: For Sri Lankan reporters, the ghosts of violence and intimidation loom again

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

  • There Are So Many Lessons To Learn From Kerala

    Indian farmers and agricultural workers have crossed the hundred-day mark of their protest against the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They will not withdraw until the government repeals laws that deliver the advantages of agriculture to large corporate houses. This, the farmers and agricultural workers say, is an existential struggle. Surrender is equivalent to death: even before these laws were passed, more than 315,000 Indian farmers had committed suicide since 1995 because of the debt burden placed on them.

    Over the next one and a half months, assembly elections will take place in four Indian states (Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal) and in one union territory (Puducherry).

    The post There Are So Many Lessons To Learn From Kerala appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Many Burdens Of Women’s Work

    My younger sister, 18, is in her first year of college studying marine navigation. She sees herself travelling the world one day, the captain of a cruise ship or similarly large vessel.

    Already, she has faced overt and repeated sexism, from her male peers. Both my sister and her female roommate have found themselves subjected to sexist jokes and unwanted sexual advances from those who do not appear to understand the meaning of the word “no.” They have been told by a female teacher that for the two per cent of women in the industry, sexual assault is an inevitability.

    My mother, an airline captain, has been counselling her on how to make it in an industry where women are not easily accepted. A great deal of her advice hinges on keeping the peace with male colleagues; knowing what to let slide, when to confront colleagues directly about their behaviour, and when to report them.

    The post The Many Burdens Of Women’s Work appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Manifesto: Draft Proposal For The Founding Of The International Working Peoples Association, 1979

    Lorenzo Kom’boa  Ervin is probably best known for Anarchism and the Black Revolution, a fifty-six page manifesto that was arguably the first work to systematically apply the principles and theories of anarchism to the history of Black struggle and the question of Black liberation. First published in 1979, Anarchism and the Black Revolution  was written while the Chattanooga-born Irvin was incarcerated in the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois serving a life sentence for hijacking . Ervin was first introduced to anarchism during an interim stint in the Federal Detention Center in…

    The post Manifesto: Draft Proposal For The Founding Of The International Working Peoples Association, 1979 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.