30 May 2023 - NPWJ News Digest on FGM & women's rights

Articles

Israel ranked lowest of all OECD countries in gender equality index
Time of Israel, 29 May 2023

The full OECD index — published in March but only picked up by Israeli media this week — examined 179 countries around the world on four parameters: discrimination within the family framework, protection and personal security, access to financial resources, and the exercise of civil liberties. On discrimination within the family, Israel scored 40.9 while the average for OECD countries was 14.2 and the global average was 37.8. Attorney Ayelet Razin Bet Or, director of government’s Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women, told Ynet that the findings “are troubling and require all those involved in the issue to conduct a thorough examination, each in their own area.” She expressed hope that the formation of a Ministry for the Advancement of the Status of Women, under Likud’s May Golan, would prioritize the issue nationally, including allocating resources to narrow the gaps. “Gender equality is a component of the resilience, prosperity and stability of a society,” Razin Bet Or said. “The State of Israel has made inroads, but there is no doubt that reaching the goal is still far away.”
 

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Erdoğan and his hardline allies have won Turkey – women and LGBTQ+ people will pay the price
The Guardian , 29 May 2023

On Sunday, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was declared the winner of Turkey’s presidential runoff elections. According to numbers reported by the state-owned Anadolu news agency, more than 27 million voters cast their ballots in favour of Erdoğan, who has been at the country’s helm for more than two decades. He entered the second round in the lead in the polls, and was expected by most to emerge victorious. Although Erdoğan captured slightly more than half of the vote, more than 25 million people also mobilised to vote against him. The elections were being held under deeply unfair conditions, with an opposition set up to fail. Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was recently sentenced to more than two years in prison and banned from holding public office for insulting members of the supreme election council. This left the opposition unable to nominate its maybe most promising candidate. This was all amid biased media coverage, relentless smear campaigns against the eventual opposition candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, threats, manipulation and a crackdown on civil society, such as the arrest of 126 Kurdish lawyers, activists and politicians at the end of April in Diyarbakır.

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“We are making a difference”: Advocating against period poverty and female genital mutilation in The Gambia
UNFPA, 29 May 2023

“When a girl starts to menstruate, that's when the problems usually start,” said Ndeye Rose Sarr, UNFPA’s representative in The Gambia. As many women and girls know, periods can be painful. Physical symptoms such as cramping and soreness, combined with the stigma surrounding menstruation, can interrupt schooling, work and women’s and girls’ full participation in society. Ms. Sarr said period poverty, or the inability to access or pay for menstrual hygiene products, is an especially acute issue across The Gambia’s rural areas – one with long-term implications for girls when it comes to education. “Period poverty leads to girls skipping school for around five days every month because they worry about staining their clothes and being shamed. That’s between 40 and 50 days in a school year,” she said. To address this challenge, UNFPA has launched an initiative in The Gambia’s Upper River region, Basse, to produce recyclable sanitary products that will be made accessible for free in schools. Women factory workers machine sew the reusable pads, providing opportunities for income and employment.

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South Carolina six-week abortion ban temporarily halted Published
BBC News, 27 May 2023

A judge has halted the implementation of a law that would have seen most abortions be banned in South Carolina. The bill outlaws abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy - before most women know they are pregnant. But 24 hours later, Judge Clifton Newman halted its implementation pending state Supreme Court review. The majority of southern US states have curtailed abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion last year. South Carolina's Republican Governor, Henry McMaster, has filed an emergency motion requesting that the state Supreme Court expedite the case. The vote to pass the law largely followed along party lines but was opposed by the three Republican women in the state's Senate. The bill, known as the "Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act", would ban abortions in most cases after early cardiac activity can be detected in a foetus or embryo - normally about six weeks into a pregnancy.

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Afghanistan: Taliban’s treatment of women and girls should be investigated as the crime against humanity of gender persecution
Amnesty International, 26 May 2023

The Taliban’s severe restrictions and unlawful crackdown on women and girls’ rights should be investigated as possible crimes under international law, including the crime against humanity of gender persecution, Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists said today in a new joint report. The report, ‘The Taliban’s war on women: The crime against humanity of gender persecution in Afghanistan’, presents a detailed legal analysis of how the Taliban’s draconian restrictions on the rights of Afghanistan’s women and girls, together with the use of imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment, could amount to the crime against humanity of gender persecution under Article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists consider that the prosecutors of the International Criminal Court should include the crime against humanity of gender persecution in their ongoing investigation into the situation in Afghanistan. The organizations are also calling on other states to exercise universal jurisdiction or other lawful means to bring to justice Taliban members suspected of responsibility for crimes under international law.
 

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Conservative attacks on US abortion and trans healthcare come from the same place
The Guardian , 24 May 2023

On Monday, Jim Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, signed a law that bans abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricts gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. The ban on trans medical care takes effect in October and the abortion ban goes into effect immediately. And so Nebraska has become the latest state to determine through law what might have once been determined by the more pliable tools of custom or imagination: the way that the sexed body a person is born with shapes the kind of life they can live. Be it through forced pregnancy or prohibited transition, the state of Nebraska now claims the right to determine what its citizens will do with their sexed bodies – what those bodies will look like, how they will function and what they will mean. It is a part of the right’s ongoing project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements, to re-establish the dominance of men in public life, to narrow possibilities for difference and expression and to inscribe in law a firm definition and hierarchy of gender: that people are either men or women and that men are better.

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