Author: Naureen Shameen

Condemning the UN NGO Committee Practice of Silencing Civil Society

The UN’s NGO Committee is failing to uphold basic principles of transparency, due process, non-discrimination and respect for fundamental human rights in its work, say UN experts and civil society organisations.

(New York) – The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association has added his voice to the alarm expressed about the practice of the UN’s NGO Committee, which acts as the gatekeeper to NGO participation in many UN bodies and processes. The Special Rapporteur’s call comes on top of an unprecedented mobilisation of over 230 NGOs from around the world calling this week on the Committee to respect basic principles of transparency, due process, non-discrimination and respect for fundamental human rights in its work.

In a commentary published today, UN expert Maina Kiai condemned yesterday’s vote at the NGO Committee against granting accreditation to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ). States including Azerbaijan, Burundi, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Sudan and Venezuela all voted against accrediting CPJ, striking a blow against freedom of expression, a free press, access to information, and the protection of journalists.

According to the Special Rapporteur, despite repeated expert calls for reform of the practice of the Committee, including through his own report to the UN General Assembly in 2014, ‘not much has changed’.

‘The practice of NGO harassment by some Committee members’ continues to ‘profoundly undermine the ability of the United Nations to constructively engage with civil society,’ Mr Kiai said.

According to ISHR’s Eleanor Openshaw, the practice of many States at the UN’s NGO Committee in seeking to silence civil society is emblematic and reflective of attacks and restrictions on civil society at the national level, a view shared by the Special Rapporteur.

‘The same governments that are restricting NGOs domestically are stepping up efforts to take away NGOs’ voices on the international stage as well. They are doing this by hijacking, and subsequently closing, the main door used by civil society to enter the United Nations system: the Committee on NGOs,’ Mr Kiai said.

Read on for the full article from ISHR.

Read the Special Rapporteur’s statement.

Rights Spotlight: May 28th – International Day of Action for Women’s Health

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Today, May 28th, is the International Day of Action for Women’s Health.

May 28th has been commemorated by gender justice and women’s health advocates and their communities since 1987 and this day of action remains a key element of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) movement building.

Today is about our universal rights, about our bodies and our lives. Together, we declare that women’s health matters.

Join OURs this May 28th in celebrating the International Day of Action for Women’s Health and stand in solidarity with activists and individuals worldwide.

What is OURs?

OURs aims to monitor, analyze, and share information on anti-rights initiatives threatening our human rights systems. Our goal is to strengthen the work of activists facing direct challenges to rights, especially rights related to gender and sexuality.

Resources and further information

This May 28th, OURs highlights a selection of resources for activists working on rights related to sexual and reproductive health and rights worldwide.

Please share these with your networks, let us know of your key resources, and tweet using the hashtags #RightsAreUniversal, #May28 and #Womenshealthmatters

 

Editor of Bangladesh LGBT magazine killed

The editor of Bangladesh’s only LGBT magazine has been killed in the latest of a series of horrific murders of bloggers and activists.

Xulhaz Mannan was one of two people hacked to death in an attack in the capital, Dhaka, police said, by a gang posing as couriers in order to gain access to his apartment in the Kalabagan district.

Mohammad Iqbal, the officer in charge of the local police station, confirmed that about six people had entered the apartment building and hacked Mannan and his friend to death in a first-floor flat. Two other people were seriously injured.

“A person came with a box identifying himself as courier service personnel. Xulhaz took him upstairs to his flat,” Iqbal said.

Mannan, 35, was the editor of Roopbaan, the country’s only magazine for the LGBT community and also worked at the US development agency USAid. The magazine had been launched in 2014 to promote greater acceptance of LGBT communities in Bangladesh.

Read the full article on the Guardian now. 

Charges of blasphemy against WHRD and academic: Kuwait

Second summons issued against human rights defender Shaikha Binjasim

On 19 April 2016, human rights defender Ms Shaikha Binjasim received a second summons in relation to new charges of blasphemy and humiliating the religion of the State. The human rights defender has been asked to report to the public prosecutor’s office on Sunday morning, 24 April 2016, in the Houli area, Kuwait City. If charged, Shaikha Binjasim could face up to one year’s imprisonment under blasphemy law.

On 14 April 2016, in a separate investigation, Shaikha Binjasim appeared before the public prosecutor, who charged her with blasphemy and humiliating the religion of the State for having declared in a television interview on the Kuwaiti channel Al-Shahed, that the constitution of Kuwait is above the Quran and Shari’a.

Read more from Frontline Defenders now. 

Year after landmark case, widows still waiting for equal inheritance rights.

E.S. had been married for 10 years when her husband died. Almost overnight, her life—and her three young children’s—collapsed. E.S.’s in-laws kicked her out of her modest home in Tanzania. She and her children took refuge with her parents.  Another widow in Tanzania, S.C., and her infant were also ordered out of their home, in that case too by in-laws.

Under the customary inheritance laws of many communities in Tanzania, a widow with children inherits nothing from her husband.  These laws also deny women the right to inherit clan land or to be administrators of their relatives’ estates.  Sons inherit clan land and the largest share of personal property, while daughters get no clan land and the smallest share of personal property.

E.S. and S.C. went to court, asserting that their community’s inheritance laws violated Tanzania’s constitution and human rights obligations. One court recognized the discrimination, but rejected their claims. The appeals court took four years to hear the case, and then dismissed it on a technicality. With no hope of justice in these courts, the widows turned to the United Nations.

Last April, in its landmark decision, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (the CEDAW Committee) found that Tanzania’s codified customary law violated the women’s rights by denying them equality in respect of inheritance.  It also found that Tanzania’s courts had violated their rights of access to justice and to an effective remedy. It recommended that the Tanzanian government compensate both widows, and called for constitutional and customary law reforms and practical measures to eliminate this discrimination.

However, a year later, the widows are still waiting.

Read the full article from Human Rights Watch now.

Barred from hundreds of occupations in Russia, a few women fight back

Svetlana Medvedeva cannot rise to the top of her chosen profession for a very simple reason – she is a woman.

The ambition of the 30-year-old mother of two is to earn a much better wage as the captain of a boat on the Volga River, which runs through her hometown of Samara. And with the degree she earned in 2005 from Samara River College, she should be well on her way — or already there.

But with the system in place on the Volga, the occupation of captain requires her to have prior experience as a ship mechanic. And that job is one of hundreds that are open to men only in Russia, according to the law.

A Russian government resolution passed in 2000 prohibits women from 38 industries and over 450 jobs it deems to be “dangerous” or “arduous.”

Adopted during President Vladimir Putin’s first year in office, it was the latest incarnation of Soviet-era regulations that sought to keep women in what the Communist Party once called their “traditional” role of bearing children for the greater good of society.

Read the full article from Radio Free Europe now. 

Indians decry Hindu leader’s temple rape comment

Hindu religious leader Shankaracharya Swami Swaroopanand Saraswati has ignited an outcry in India after saying that entry of women in Shani temple in Maharashtra state will lead to more crimes such as rapes.

Commenting on the recent entry of women in a temple in western Maharashtra state, Shankaracharya, 94, said on Sunday that “women should not feel triumphant about visiting the sanctum sanctorum of Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra.

“They should stop all the drum beating about what they have done. Worshipping Shani will bring ill luck to them and give rise to crimes against them like rape,” he was quoted as saying by the Indian Express newspaper on Sunday.

Women’s groups and activists decried the comment, describing the statement as patriarchal and against the dignity of women.

“Society is not going to tolerate this. Women will struggle against such mindset,” Jagmati Sangwan, General Secretary of All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), told Al Jazeera by phone on Monday.

Last week, Maharashtra High Court struck down a 400-year-old ban on entry of women in Shani Shingnapur temple on the ground that women cannot be discriminated on basis of their gender.

Read the full article on Al Jazeera.

Anti-LGBT group from U.S. holds Barbados conference

An anti-LGBT group from the U.S. held a conference in Barbados this past weekend.

National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown and Scott Strim, an American evangelical who opposes efforts to repeal Belize’s sodomy law, spoke at the World Congress of Families Caribbean Regional Conference that took place at a resort on the Caribbean island on April 8-9.

Josh and Caroline Craddock of CitizenGO, which describes itself as a “community of active citizens” who use “online petitions and action alerts as a resource to defend and promote life, family and liberty,” were among those who were also present.

An agenda posted to the conference’s website indicates that Brown was scheduled to speak on a panel titled, “Marriage as a public good: Why we should defend marriage as between one man and one woman.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center has designed the World Congress of Families as a hate group.

Those who presented at the conference also spoke against abortion and contraception.

Read the full article from the Washington Blade now. 

India: extremists leave no room for beef eaters

A series of murders in India, linked to the slaughter of cattle and consumption of beef, is raising questions about whether the Hindu-dominated country is becoming less tolerant of minority religious groups.

Dawn has broken and Manjesh Prasad is preparing for his daily puja. He’s dressed in an orange dhoti, a length of cloth wrapped around his legs and waist and knotted under his bulging belly, ready to perform the ancient Hindu ritual.

Mr Prasad disappears into a small shrine on his uncle’s 15-acre farm to make his spiritual connection with the divine. He returns a quarter of an hour later, changed into a collared shirt and pants and ready for his day job. More holy work, as he sees it, managing a “gaoshala”, or cow shelter in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.

“We have protected 650 cows with the help of the public,” says Mr Prasad.

Gaoshalas are common in India, run by Hindus like Mr Prasad in an attempt to protect cows from being slaughtered for meat.  “The cows are like a God to us,” he explains.

Mr Prasad walks among the cattle – patting one here, another there.  But his gentle disposition dissolves when asked about people who slaughter cattle.

“We should kill them,” he says.  “We should kill them because there is no other way.”

And what about Christians and Muslims who eat beef?

“Killed,” he says firmly.

Read the full article at SBS.com.au. 

Key points from Pope Francis’s major new document on family issues

After two years of high-level meetings to discuss some of the most contentious and most personal issues in the Catholic church — including gay marriage, cohabitation and divorce — Pope Francis published a major teaching on Friday about the Catholic family.

Don’t have time to read the whole 256-page document? Take the time to read these six key excerpts, which together sum up Francis’s conclusions.

1. The Church defines the ideal relationship as a heterosexual marriage. But Francis writes that other loving relationships can have value too.

“Christian marriage, as a reflection of the union between Christ and his Church, is fully realized in the union between a man and a woman who give themselves to each other in a free, faithful and exclusive love, who belong to each other until death and are open to the transmission of life, and are consecrated by the sacrament, which grants them the grace to become a domestic church and a leaven of new life for society. Some forms of union radically contradict this ideal, while others realize it in at least a partial and analogous way. The Synod Fathers stated that the Church does not disregard the constructive elements in those situations which do not yet or no longer correspond to her teaching on marriage.”

2. That being said, Francis makes it totally clear in this document that he won’t support gay marriage.

“During the Synod, we discussed the situation of families whose members include persons who experience same-sex attraction, a situation not easy either for parents or for children. We would like before all else to reaffirm that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration, while ‘every sign of unjust discrimination’ is to be carefully avoided, particularly any form of aggression and violence…. In discussing the dignity and mission of the family, the Synod Fathers observed that, ‘as for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.’”

Read the full article on the Washington Post now.