Naureen Shameen, Author at OURs - The Observatory of the Universality of Rights

Blasphemy cases rise in Egypt and Christians bear the brunt

In the video, the Egyptian Christian teens laugh playfully as a couple of them kneel down, imitating Muslim prayers, then another slides his hand under one boy’s neck, imitating the trademark beheadings of the Islamic State group.

The boys were playing around, satirizing the extremist group, and their school supervisor just happened to be videoing them, their defenders say. The result has been catastrophic: they were sentenced to prison under Egypt’s blasphemy laws — they were mocking Muslim prayers, prosecutors said — and have fled into hiding, leaving behind shattered families.

“My son was sentenced to five years for a laugh,” Iman Aziz, weeping, said in the teens’ home village of Nassariya in southern Egypt. Her son, Muller Atef, was seen in the 32-second video laughing but not joining in the “prayers.”

The verdict last month points to an irony in Egypt. Two years ago, the military ousted the Muslim Brotherhood from power, and since then the government has been waging a harsh crackdown on Islamists.

Yet in the past three years, prosecutions on charges of insulting Islam have risen dramatically. From three such cases in 2011, there were 21 cases in the courts in 2015, around half targeting Christians, according to Ishaq Ibrahim, a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

Read the full article from the Associated Press.

North Carolina Enacts Law To Allow LGBT Discrimination

Republican leaders of the North Carolina General Assembly on Wednesday rushed through a bill to repeal all local LGBT nondiscrimination ordinances in the state and ban transgender people from certain restrooms.

Introduced and passed within 10 hours, the bill then went to Gov. Pat McCrory’s desk. He signed it around 10 p.m. Wednesday, citing North Carolina residents’ expectation of privacy and “basic community norms.”

Republicans had unveiled the legislation Wednesday morning, arguing the measure was needed to protect women from transgender people and sex predators. They were reacting to an ordinance in Charlotte — which had been scheduled to take effect April 1 — that would protect LGBT people from discrimination in housing and public accommodations.

The governor and other critics claimed the public accommodations portion of the city ordinance posed a safety threat by allowing transgender women, whom they called “men,” to prey on women and girls.

“The basic expectation of privacy in the most personal of settings, a restroom or locker room, for each gender was violated by government overreach and intrusion by the mayor and city council of Charlotte,” McCrory said in a statement that explained why he signed the bill into law.

Read the full article at BuzzFeed.

Conservative Muslim lawyers’ group behind spike in Pakistani blasphemy cases

A little-known alliance of hundreds of lawyers in Pakistan is behind the rise in prosecutions for blasphemy, a crime punishable by death that goes to the heart of an ideological clash between reformers and religious conservatives.

The group, whose name translates as The Movement for the Finality of the Prophethood, offers free legal advice to complainants and has packed courtrooms with representatives, a tactic critics say is designed to help it gain convictions.

The stated mission of the Khatm-e-Nubuwwat Lawyers’ Forum and its leader Ghulam Mustafa Chaudhry is uncompromising: to use its expertise and influence to ensure that anyone insulting Islam or the Prophet Mohammad is charged, tried and executed.

“Whoever does this (blasphemy), the punishment is only death. There is no alternative,” Chaudhry told supporters crammed into his small office behind the towering red-brick High Court building in the eastern city of Lahore.

The campaign could complicate the government’s tentative efforts to reform blasphemy legislation, a tough task in a country where support for the law is widespread.

Read the full article on Reuters.

Far-Right homophobic thugs attack LGBT Equality Festival in Lviv

The Equality Festival events planned for this weekend in Lviv have been disrupted and the activists effectively – and with violence – driven out of the city. The police did not detain any of the young far-right thugs in masks who first harassed activists, then surrounded the hotel and attacked a coach with Equality Festival activists.

The LGBT initiative Equality Festival had planned an Equality ‘Quest’ on March 19, as part of various anti-discrimination, pro-tolerance events over the weekend. The quest was to go around places linked with ideals of equality and freedom within the city.

During the early hours of Saturday morning, the Lviv District Administrative Court passed a ruling banning all events in the area where the Equality Festival quest had been planned.

The pretext was depressingly familiar. The Sokol nationalist organization had informed that it would be holding an event – almost certainly a counter-demonstration – and the Mayor’s Office asked for all events on the square outside the Opera Theatre to be banned. The European Court of Human Rights has on a number of occasions found that the likelihood of counter-events does not justify restricting citizens right to peaceful assembly. The regional police also asked for the ban, although it is they who are obliged to protect all citizens exercising their right to gather.

Read the full article on Human Rights in Ukraine now.

Nigerian lawmakers voted down a women equality bill citing the Bible and Sharia law

Nigerian lawmakers on Tuesday, voted against a gender and equal opportunities bill. The bill, which did not pass a second reading, was aimed at bridging the gap between the rights of men and women in Nigeria. It also sought to end questionable and unpleasant stereotypical practices that drive discrimination based on gender.

While the bill garnered support from some lawmakers, male and female, it ultimately failed to progress on the senate floor as a majority voted against it. Before voting, various senators who opposed the bill, spoke about the incompatibility of the bill with religious laws and beliefs.

As a whole, the bill focuses on eliminating discrimination based on gender in the fields of politics, education and employment. It also prohibits violence—domestic and sexual—against women.

Read the full article at Quartz Africa.

Sierra Leone abortion bill blocked by President Bai Koroma again

Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma has again refused to sign a bill legalising abortion, saying it should be put to a referendum.

It was unanimously passed by MPs in December, but Mr Koroma refused to sign it after protests by religious leaders.

After consultations, MPs returned the bill to him last month, unaltered.

The law would allow women to terminate a pregnancy in any circumstances up to 12 weeks and in cases of incest, rape and foetal impairment up to 24 weeks.

Abortion is currently illegal in Sierra Leone under any circumstances.

Human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and five Sierra Leonean organisations, wrote to President Koroma in February urging him to give the bill his assent.

“Unsafe abortions – often resulting from restrictive laws and poor access to sexual and reproductive health services, information, and education – is one of the main factors contributing to maternal deaths in Sierra Leone,” their letter said.

The World Health Organization estimates that Sierra Leone has the world’s highest maternal mortality ratio at 1,360 deaths per 100,000 live births last year.

Read the full article on BBC News now.

Top UN Expert on Torture Demands an End to Abuses in Health Care

In a landmark new report presented today to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez says that severe abuses in health care settings amount to cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment—and even torture. The Open Society Foundations and the Campaign to Stop Torture in Health Care welcome this conclusion, which places immediate legal obligations on governments to end such abuses.

Responsible for interpreting international understandings of torture, the Special Rapporteur’s report is the first systematic examination of torture and ill-treatment committed in health care contexts. The report says that abuse cannot be justified by claims of “medical necessity,” and it underscores the fundamental need for free, full, and informed consent by patients to any and all medical procedures.

The Special Rapporteur highlights examples of forced treatments that can constitute torture and ill-treatment:

Forced sterilization of women, transgender, and intersex people, and forced abortion—a violation disproportionately suffered by those women who face systemic discrimination, like ethnic minorities, women with disabilities, and women living with HIV.
Forced treatment and involuntary commitment of people with psychosocial (mental) disabilities, and the use of restraints, and solitary confinement.
Forced detention of drug users in inhumane facilities under the guise of treatment. Detention itself often results in painful drug withdrawal, and many facilities mandate so-called therapies—often overseen by non-medical personnel—which include beatings, shock therapy, and rigorous manual labor.

Read the full article on Open Society Foundations now.

Top Pakistani religious body rules women’s protection law ‘un-Islamic’

A powerful Pakistani religious body that advises the government on the compatibility of laws with Islam on Thursday declared a new law that criminalizes violence against women to be “un-Islamic.”

The Women’s Protection Act, passed by Pakistan’s largest province of Punjab last week, gives unprecedented legal protection to women from domestic, psychological and sexual violence. It also calls for the creation of a toll-free abuse reporting hot line and the establishment of women’s shelters.

But since its passage in the Punjab assembly, many conservative clerics and religious leaders have denounced the new law as being in conflict with the Muslim holy book, the Koran, as well as Pakistan’s constitution.

“The whole law is wrong,” Muhammad Khan Sherani, the head of the Council of Islamic Ideology said at a news conference, citing verses from the Koran to point out that the law was “un-Islamic.”

The 54-year-old council is known for its controversial decisions. In the past it has ruled that DNA cannot be used as primary evidence in rape cases, and it supported a law that requires women alleging rape to get four male witnesses to testify in court before a case is heard.

The council’s decision this January to block a bill to impose harsher penalties for marrying off girls as young as eight or nine has angered human rights activists.

Read the full article on Reuters.

Historic meeting of gender and sexual rights activists from across Africa

Human rights defenders from nearly twenty countries across Africa have gathered in Johannesburg ahead of this week’s Africa Regional Seminar on “Finding Practical Solutions to Address Violence and Discrimination against Persons Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression”.

This unique meeting is one of the largest gatherings of African activists working on issues relating to sexualorientation and gender identity and expression (SOGIE). It aims to generate learning among civil society organisations on the lived realities of sexual and gender minorities in different parts of the continent, and to use this knowledge to identify key advocacy priorities in ending violence and discrimination based on SOGIE in Africa.

“As human rights defenders working on gender and sexuality, it’s very important that we work together,” noted Fadzai Muparutsa of the Coalition of African Lesbians. “Before we engage with governments and other state actors, we need to have time and space to consider our diverse lived experiences. We need to understand better how different forms of oppression interact and intersect, particularly in women’s lives,” she added.

Sexual and gender minorities continue to be targets of violence, discrimination and abuse. This violence is often state-sanctioned, in many cases being carried out by police and other state agencies. Discriminatory beliefs are often endorsed by religious and traditional leaders, and given further currency through sensationalist media coverage. Such practices further stigmatise vulnerable communities, and result in people being denied access to medical, legal and other essential services because of their real or presumed sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.

Read on at the Coalition of African Lesbians’ site.

Rights groups decry Afghanistan ‘virginity tests’

The Independent Human Rights Commission of Afghanistan has voiced concern over “virginity tests” carried out on women or girls accused of sex outside marriage.

The commission, known as the AIHRC, said females were forcibly subjected to the invasive vaginal and rectal tests after being accused of “moral crimes” by judiciary institutions.

The results of the examinations were then used as evidence in the defendants’ trials.

The national institution interviewed 53 women and girls – some as young as 13, who had been accused of having sex outside marriage, which is punishable by up to 15 years in prison in the country.

A large majority of them said they were forced into virginity tests by government doctors. Twenty of them were examined more than once.

The AIHRC also questioned the legitimacy of the methods used in the tests, saying they were being conducted without considering scientific inaccuracies and misinterpretations, as well as corruption in government institutions, and technical insufficiency that could affect the exams’ results.

Read the full article on Al Jazeera now.