Category: Tradition, Culture, Religion

Qatar’s Christian Crusaders

THE GULF STATE of Qatar is small but exceptionally rich and uses its money relentlessly to acquire friends and influence. The recipients of its largesse have been many and various, from Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation in the United States to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. But while there have often been complaints about Qatar’s support for militant Muslims its dubious links with non-Muslim religious groups have largely gone unnoticed.

Over the last decade Qatar has been working quietly with socially-conservative elements in the west to promote “traditional” ideas of family life. In doing so it has readily joined forces with Mormons and the more reactionary parts of the Roman Catholic church. It has also helped fund a right-wing think tank set up by a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party.

In turn, these western groups seem content to accept support from a country where polygamy is legal, where gay sex — and, indeed, any kind of sex outside marriage — is a crime, where loveless arranged marriages are not uncommon, where a husband can divorce a wife simply by saying so three times but a wife who wishes to divorce her husband must go to court.

Read the rest of the article at Medium.

Egypt’s tougher penalties for FGM will have little impact, say rights groups

Egypt has increased the penalty for practising female genital mutilation to a sentence of between three and 15 years in jail, although campaigners say this will have little impact.

Successful convictions of doctors or others found to be performing the procedure are extremely rare, despite it being illegal in Egypt since 2008.

Raslan Fadl, the first doctor to be sentenced in Egypt, was recently found to have walked free after serving the minimum three-month sentence. The nature of the law allowed Fadl to negotiate with the family of 13-year-old Sohair al-Bata’a, who died after he performed FGM on her, to serve the lowest possible sentence.

On Sunday, Egypt’s cabinet proposed an amendment to the law banning FGM, which would classify it as a crime rather than a misdemeanour. Practitioners could now receive up to 15 years in jail if a victim dies, while anyone who accompanies girls to be cut could face between one and three years in prison.

“This new law won’t necessarily stop private reconciliation,” said lawyer Reda el Danbouki, who fought the Bata’a case. “If anything, it imposes a sentence on the families or whoever escorts the girl to the operation – the family will not want to say they took the girl to undergo FGM, or else they will face prison themselves.” It is common for deaths caused by FGM to be deliberately misreported by both practitioners and families, further obscuring the possibility of cracking down on those who carry it out.

Read the rest of the article at The Guardian.

OURs at the AWID Forum 2016

Join us at the AWID Forum this September 8-11th in Bahia, Brazil, to stand in solidarity with each other, to strategize towards a feminist future, and to bring together our movements in a safe space.

Now is the time to imagine futures free from oppressions, injustice, war and violence and to develop concrete strategies for people and planet based on our shared humanity.

OURs at the AWID Forum

For the first time, this year OURs is proud to host events at the 13th AWID International Forum. Look for us to highlight the impacts of conservative actors on our human rights and discuss progressive moves, innovative tactics and organizing by activists around the world to push back against the undermining of our fundamental rights and freedoms.

OURs is coordinating the following events:

Other events relevant to our work:

And some of the events our Working Group members are hosting:

If you are interested in the work of OURs or would like to collaborate, please get in touch.

For those attending the AWID Forum, we invite you to join our session, and for those not present, please join the conversation on Twitter with the following hashtags:

#RightsAreUniversal

#AWIDForum

 

The Islamic Republic’s War on Women

The election of Hassan Rouhani gave new momentum to Iran’s devout Muslim feminists — but the mullahs aren’t having it

By Ziba Mir-Hosseini

The phone calls started about six weeks ago. Men who didn’t introduce themselves, working for Iran’s security agencies, rang the country’s most prominent women’s rights activists and demanded they show up for interrogations.

All the activists were told the same thing: “Don’t tell anyone we’ve called you here. Don’t speak to the media, don’t breathe a word to anyone.” But word seeped out, first in Tehran’s feminist circles and then among political activists, who traded accounts of interrogations and lines of questioning.

The Iranian government’s crackdown on feminists, one of the Islamic Republic’s periodic intimidation campaigns against women’s rights activists, is still underway. But the present iteration isn’t just a push-and-pull struggle between the government and civil society, or between the censors and the country’s most prominent women’s magazine — it’s a proxy battle between the president and the country’s hard-liners.

Iran’s women’s rights activists, both religious and secular, seized the space offered by President Hassan Rouhani’s 2013 election to emerge from the underground and engage again in public life. The Revolutionary Guards and the clerical establishment have responded by charging a vast international “feminist conspiracy” to undermine the Islamic Republic, funded by wealthy Western donors, intellectually articulated by feminist academics based abroad, and conducted by foot soldiers inside Iran — and even inside the president’s cabinet.

Read the rest of the article from Foreign Policy.

Outrage in Russia after religious leaders back female genital mutilation

Two prominent religious leaders in Russia have provoked outrage after suggesting female genital mutilation could help reduce sexual promiscuity.

The scandal erupted on Wednesday when Vsevolod Chaplin, a former spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church, rushed to the defence of Ismail Berdiyev, a senior Muslim cleric from Dagestan who said “all women” should be subjected to the practice to eliminate sexual depravity.

Mr Berdiyev, chairman of the Coordination Centre of North Caucasus Muslims, made the controversial comments when asked to comment on a report into the practice published earlier this week.

…The United Nations estimates 200 million women and girls across 30 countries where the practice is concentrated are victims of female genital mutilation.

The practice can cause severe pain and long term health problems and is internationally recognized as a violation of human rights.

Read the rest of the article from The Telegraph.

Africa: Challenges of Culture and Conscience

In Biblical times, the Prophet Hosea lamented, “[M]y people die for lack of knowledge.” In the 21st century, African women are dying for lack of knowledge, but also in the name of religion.

In my life as an African woman, a physician and former minister of health in Ghana—and more recently in my work as an advocate for sexual and reproductive rights—I have seen too many African women die a senseless and painful death because they were unable to realize their reproductive rights.

Thousands of African women die every year from preventable pregnancy-related causes because religious leaders prevent politicians and policymakers from passing laws and implementing services needed to save them. The African Union’s latest Maternal Newborn and Child Health Status Report shows that most countries in Africa have seen reductions in maternal mortality, although the average rate remains exceedingly high at more than 500 deaths per 100,000 live births, amounting to 56 percent of total global maternal mortality.

Read the full article, by Eunice Brookman-Amissah (former minister of health in Ghana and former president of Ipas), at Conscience.

Child marriage shows it takes a village to achieve a goal

The aim of the sustainable development goals is to create sustainable social, economic and environmental change. In our view they need to be met by approaches that are holistic and integrated.

Last month experts from the Copenhagen Consensus Centre argued that cherrypicking 19 of the UN’s SDGs could produce the greatest returns – effectively doubling or quadrupling the aid budget.

However, our experience shows us that it’s not helpful to cherrypick certain issues, to separate human development from the environment, or good governance. Each goal and target in the framework cannot be isolated from the others.

One powerful example of this is gender equality. We know that it cannot be achieved in a vacuum. Take child marriage – a form of violence against girls that means 15 million girls each year lose out on their childhood. It happens most in societies where women and girls face gender-based discrimination, inequality and harmful social norms that mean they are not valued equally to boys and men. And women and girls don’t experience this violence in isolation. If they marry too young they are much more likely to experience other forms of violence in their lifetimes, such as domestic violence. They are also more likely to drop out of school, face complications in childbirth and continue the cycle of poverty.

To end this practice by 2030, we need to recognise it is linked to a wide range of issues, including education, poverty, governance, other forms of violence against girls and attitudes to girls’ rights. Child marriage will not end without communities and societies that support gender equality.

Read the rest of the article at The Guardian.

Iran: Women’s rights activists treated as ‘enemies of the state’ in crackdown

Iranian authorities have intensified their repression of women’s rights activists in the country in the first half of this year, carrying out a series of harsh interrogations and increasingly likening any collective initiative relating to women’s rights to criminal activity, Amnesty International said today.

The organization’s research reveals that since January 2016 more than a dozen women’s rights activists in Tehran have been summoned for long, intensive interrogations by the Revolutionary Guards, and threatened with imprisonment on national security-related charges.

Many had been involved in a campaign launched in October 2015, which advocated for increased representation of women in Iran’s February 2016 parliamentary election.

“It is utterly shameful that the Iranian authorities are treating peaceful activists who seek women’s equal participation in decision-making bodies as enemies of the state. Speaking up for women’s equality is not a crime. We are calling for an immediate end to this heightened harassment and intimidation, which is yet another blow for women’s rights in Iran,” said Magdalena Mughrabi, Interim Deputy Middle East and North Africa Programme Director at Amnesty International.

“Rather than addressing Iran’s disturbing record on women’s rights the Iranian authorities have once again opted for repression, accusing women’s rights activists of collusion in western-orchestrated plots in a bid to maintain their discriminatory practices towards women.”

Read the full article at Amnesty International.

Anti-LGBT Movement in Indonesia Attempts to Criminalize Same-Sex Relations

With negative public sentiment toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) reaching an all-time high, the anti-LGBT movement in the country is seeking to criminalize same-sex relationships.

A group of academics and activists have requested that the Constitutional Court annul a number of articles in the Criminal Code (KUHP) to make it illegal for homosexuals to engage in sexual activities.

The court, which has affirmed that the plaintiffs have constitutional grounds to present their case, has held five hearings in which expert witnesses, presented by the petitioners, told the court that homosexuality was “contagious” and that it “could trigger a spike in HIV infections”.

One of the plaintiffs, Rita Hendrawaty, who is also chairwoman of an organization called the Family Love Alliance, claimed she did not intend to put LGBT people in prison.

“The government asked us [why we are trying to criminalize LGBT people], saying that if we do so, then prisons will be full. But we are merely trying to take preventive measures, so that Indonesia has clearer norms and regulations stipulating that anyone having casual sex is committing adultery,” she told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

…The various attempts to criminalize homosexuality have alarmed advocates of LGBT rights.

“This is dangerous for our LGBT friends. No one should be allowed to criminalize a minority group in Indonesia. Furthermore, the government shouldn’t be that nosy, trying to manage people’s lives in bed,” Arus Pelangi secretary Ryan Korbarri told the Post.

Ryan said the allegation that the LGBT community was trying to spread homosexuality was baseless, as the community in Indonesia was only trying to fight to have the same rights as other Indonesian citizens.

Read the full article from The Jakarta Post.

Pan African Parliament Endorses Ban on FGM

After years of wrangling and debates among African leaders, the movement to end female genital mutilation (FGM) is gaining real momentum, with a new action plan signed this week by Pan African Parliament (PAP) representatives and the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) to end FGM as well as underage marriage.

The UNFPA has already trained over 100,000 health workers to deal specifically with aiding victims of FGM, while tens of thousands of traditional leaders have also signed pledges against the practice.

The agreement followed a PAP Women’s Caucus meeting with UNFPA representatives in Johannesburg on July 29-30.

Kicking off the meeting, PAP President Roger Dang said, “PAP is determined to help and be part of stakeholders to come up with solutions to this practice. This is in line with the mandate of PAP to defend and promote gender balance and people living with disability.”

Read the full article at Inter Press Service.