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17 Jan 2017 - NPWJ News Digest on FGM & Women's Rights
Articles
Pakistani mother sentenced to death for burning daughter alive
by The Guardian, 17 Jan 2017
A court in Pakistan sentenced a mother to death on Monday for burning her daughter alive as punishment for marrying without the family’s consent. Parveen Bibi confessed before a special court in the city of Lahore to killing her daughter in June for what she said was “bringing shame to the family”. Police said 18-year-old Zeenat Rafiq married Hassan Khan and eloped to live with his family a week before she was killed. The court sentenced Rafiq’s brother Anees to life in prison after the evidence showed her mother and brother had first beaten her, before her mother threw kerosene on her and set her on fire. After Rafiq’s murder in a poor district of Lahore, none of her relatives sought to claim her body, police said, leaving her husband’s family to bury her charred remains after dark in a graveyard near the city. Violence against women is rampant in Pakistan, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Citing media reports, it said there were more than 1,100 so-called “honour killings” in 2015.
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West Africa: Women Constitute 60 Percent of Stateless Persons in West Africa - NHRC
By All Africa, 16 Jan 2017
The National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, says out of the 750,000 stateless persons in West Africa, women constitute 60 per cent. The commission's Acting Executive Secretary, Oti Ovrawah, made the disclosure on Monday in Abuja at the maiden celebration of the ECOWAS Human Rights Day. The event, organised by the commission in collaboration with the Network of National Human Rights Institutions in West Africa (NNHRI-WA) and the ECOWAS, has the theme: "The Rights of Women and Young Persons." "The condition of women in Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps, especially, is alarming. The large number of stateless women in West Africa is also a matter of serious human rights concern," Ms. Ovrawah said. She said the aim of celebrating the first ECOWAS Human Rights Day was to have a day where West African citizens could highlight human rights issues affecting their various communities. "Human rights violations in the region are enormous; they range from poor prison conditions, weak criminal justice administration, poor access to education and information, violence against women to poor access to health. "For instance, the outbreak of the Ebola virus in 2014 is an indication of the violation of the right to health. It also showed the weak health infrastructure in the region. "Violation of the right to health is clearly a violation of the right to life," the acting NHRC scribe said. She decried the incessant exposure of Nigerian girls to prostitution, child labour and early marriage among others.
Indian girls win award for tricking traffickers and busting cross-border racket
by Reuters, 16 Jan 2017
Two Indian schoolgirls will be awarded national bravery awards next week for helping police bust a cross-border human trafficking racket, leading to the arrest of suspects in the cases of missing girls from both India and Nepal. Shivani Gond, 17, and Tejasweeta Pradhan, 18, will be honored by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for "showing exemplary courage" when acting as decoys to gain the trust of the traffickers, allowing police catch them red-handed. The girls, both from the hill district of Darjeeling in eastern India's West Bengal state, befriended the traffickers on Facebook in May 2016. They then spent days communicating with them by telephone, convincing the traffickers that they were willing to run away from home before leading them to the police.Government data showed a 52.8 percent increase in the number of minor girls "procured" and a 35.4 percent increase in the number of girls sold in 2015 compared to the previous year. West Bengal is among the top three states where traffickers lure young girls from poor families with the promise of good jobs, instead forcing them into the sex trade or into domestic servitude, campaigners say.
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Fighting for the murdered women of Buenos Aires
By Al Jazeera, 12 Jan 2017
Buenos Aires, Argentina - On October 8, in the Argentinian seaside city of Mar del Plata, 16-year-old Lucia Perez left school for the last time. She went to buy marijuana from someone she had never met, investigators hypothesise. When she arrived, she was force-fed drugs, gang-raped and penetrated by a wooden stick. Her alleged abusers then washed her body and left her at a hospital where she died. The gruesome details of the crime sparked outrage in Argentina, where every 30 hours a woman is murdered. Within two weeks, social activist group Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) had mobilised to denounce this brutal crime. On October 19, thousands of protesters shut down the streets of Buenos Aires in memory of Perez, holding signs reading: "We want women alive" and "Machismo kills". The brutal murder of Perez soon became a national and international symbol of the horrific violence women face around the world. In Latin America, a movement against gender violence is growing with Argentina at the forefront. Ni Una Menos, a collective of artists, activists and journalists, first took to the streets of Buenos Aires in June 2015 in response to a string of femicides, defined by the UN as the violent, deliberate killing of a woman. "When we women decide to take control of our own lives, we confront an increase in cruelty, which is what we see with these deaths," said Mariana Carbajal, a founding member of Ni Una Menos and journalist who covers gender violence in Argentina.
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