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25 Nov 2014 - NPWJ News Digest on FGM & women's rights
Articles
Campaign targets violence and discrimination against women and girls
By Amnesty International , 25 Nov 2014
Amnesty International supporters worldwide today join the 16 Days against Gender Violence campaign to challenge violence and discrimination against women and girls, including the denial of sexual and reproductive rights. The campaign, which runs from 25 November to 10 December, aims to celebrate heroes – women human rights defenders – in every region of the world who fight discrimination and call on governments to prevent, investigate and prosecute discrimination and violence against women and girls. “The root causes of gender-based violence and restrictions of women and girls’ sexual and reproductive rights are the same – systematic gender discrimination rooted in patriarchal structures that control women and girls’ choices and freedoms,” said Lucy Freeman, Director of Amnesty International's Gender, Sexuality and Identity Programme. “These discriminatory attitudes often cause the rights of women and girls to be undermined, for example in investigations into cases of rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, and are often used by perpetrators to justify these acts.”
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Preventing violence against women: a sluggish cascade?
By Open Democracy, 25 Nov 2014
There has been a global 'cascade' in commitments to end violence against women. But the violence keeps happening. What is needed is more support - nationally and internationally - for feminist organizations. Violence against women is international news. Joyti Singh Pandey was gang raped and tortured on a bus in Delhi and died a few weeks later in December 2012. Anene Booysen in South Africa was gang raped and tortured and died in South Africa in February 2013. These cases triggered mass protests domestically linking violence against women to grotesque governance failures. The vehemence of the protests and demands for justice and social change were heard around the world. Violence against women in conflict situations from South Sudan to eastern Congo to Ukraine to the atrocities committed by ISIS, is no longer ignored as inevitable collateral damage and made invisible to history the way it has been in the past. The elimination of this violence has pride of place in the gender equality targets in the draft ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ – the successors to the 2000 – 2015 Millennium Development Goals. But the violence keeps happening. Unambiguous condemnation, the formulation of new laws and international declarations, training of police and judicial personnel, coalitions of men against violence – what is missing?
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Turkish President Says Men and Women Are Not Equal
By TIME, 24 Nov 2014
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has caused a controversy by saying women and men are not equal—at a women’s justice summit. “You cannot put women and men on an equal footing,” Erdogansaid. “It is against nature. They were created differently. Their nature is different. Their constitution is different.” He went on to say that feminists do not understand how the Muslim faith honors mothers: “Our religion regards motherhood very highly. Feminists don’t understand that, they reject motherhood.”
This is not the first time Erdogan has gotten attention for saying something offensive about women. In the past, he has said that women should have least three kids, and he has tried to outlaw abortion, the Associated Press reports.
G.Bissau launches first female genital mutilation prosecutions
By AlArabiya, 22 Nov 2014
Guinea-Bissau will try six people for female circumcision, a judicial source told AFP Friday, in the west African nation's first prosecutions since the practice was outlawed three years ago. The defendants, all of whom have appeared at preliminary court hearings since Thursday, are said to believe the practice is in keeping with their Islamic faith. The source said the defendants, two people who carried out the circumcisions and four parents, were accused of mutilating seven young girls. No further details were available. The government-run National Committee for the Abandonment of Harmful Practices, which brought the complaint, said it hoped the group would get long sentences, although they have yet to be convicted. The committee's spokesman Fatima Djau Balde said he hoped the prosecutions would "be a lesson to those still thinking of perpetuating this harmful and retrograde practice".
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Egypt’s first female genital mutilation trial ends in not guilty verdict
By The Guardian, 20 Nov 2014
The first doctor to be brought to trial in Egypt on charges of female genital mutilation (FGM) has been acquitted, crushing hopes that the landmark verdict would discourage Egyptian doctors from conducting the endemic practice. Raslan Fadl, a doctor and Islamic preacher in the village of Agga, northern Egypt, was acquitted of mutilating Sohair al-Bata’a in June 2013. The 12-year-old died during the alleged procedure, but Fadl was also acquitted of her manslaughter. No reason was given by the judge, with the verdict being simply scrawled in a court ledger, rather than being announced in the Agga courtroom. Sohair’s father, Mohamed al-Bata’a, was also acquitted of responsibility. Police and health officials testified that the child’s parents had admitted taking their daughter to Fadl’s clinic for the procedure. Despite his acquittal, the doctor was ordered to pay 5,001 Egyptian pounds (about £450) to Sohair’s mother for her daughter’s manslaughter, after the pair reached an out-of-court settlement. The case was pursued rigorously by activists and state officials in the hope that it would send a strong message to doctors that FGM, which was nominally made illegal in 2008, will no longer be tolerated in Egypt. Instead, said a lawyer from a local rights group – the first to take up Sohair’s case – the verdict signalled the opposite.
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