Tradition, Culture, Religion Archives - Page 7 of 9 - OURs - The Observatory of the Universality of Rights

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.

Egypt: five-year prison sentence for children on blasphemy charges

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights condemns the convictions and sentences recently handed down in cases involving the so called “defamation and insult” of Islam.

In the most recent case (no. 350/2015), the Beni Mazar Juvenile Misdemeanor Court sentenced three Coptic students—Muler Atef Daoud, Albert Ashraf, and Bassem Amgad—to five years in prison. A fourth defendant, Clinton Magdi, was placed in a juvenile penal institution when the case was referred to trial. The students had created a video mocking certain practices of the Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh). In another case, the Edku Misdemeanor Court on February 23 upheld a three-year sentence issued in absentia against Mustafa Abd al-Nabi after he published some religious opinions on his personal Facebook page. The EIPR notes that these sentences are part of a vicious assault on civil liberties and violate citizens’ constitutional rights, most importantly, freedom of religion, opinion, and expression.

The EIPR has documented nine cases since the beginning of 2015 in which 12 defendants, including Copts and Muslims, both Shia and Sunni, as well as atheists, were convicted. More than 11 cases are still pending before the Public Prosecution. Some 14 defendants are charged in these cases under Articles 98(f), 160, and 161 of the Penal Code, which criminalize contempt of religion. Several of the defendants have been detained pending investigation for periods exceeding the legal limit, while others were released on bail. Still other cases are pending that involve administrative sanctions, such as work suspension and docking of wages.

Read the full article from EIPR now.

FGM in Indonesia hits alarming level

Half of girls under 11 years old in Indonesia are circumcised, according to the latest finding by UNICEF, raising awareness and calls for bans on female genital mutilation ( FGM ) practices in the world’s most populous Muslim majority country.

It is the first time the global report has included Indonesia on the list, but the country ‘ combined with Egypt and Ethiopia ‘ accounts for half of 200 million girls and women in 30 countries that have undergone FGM, the study reveals.

The inclusion of Indonesia on the list, published on Friday, has raised the tally from 130 million circumcised girls and women in 29 countries estimated in 2014, albeit the study claimed that the prevalence of FGM has fallen significantly.

…

UNICEF data said prevalence of FGM in Indonesia was generally high in every province, with only Papua, East Nusa Tenggara and Bali recording one-digit percentages of circumcised girls in their respective populations. The practice is common in Jakarta, which is among the 10 provinces with the highest percentage of circumcised girls aged 11 and below, at 68.1 percent.

…

Indonesian authorities tried to ban FGM 10 years ago, but the Indonesian Ulema Council ( MUI ) issued a fatwa saying that female circumcision was part of religious practice.

In response, the Health Ministry softened its stance, issuing regulations that said the practice should only be done by medical professionals in a noninvasive way that did not injure girls and women. However, in 2013, the ministry revoked its regulations on female circumcision.

Read the full article from the Jakarta Post

Pregnant and desperate in Evangelical Brazil

As Mariana stepped out of the car, her boyfriend Rafael knew he might never see her again.

It was a sunny summer’s morning two years ago in Rio de Janeiro, and the young couple had pulled up outside a small house in a residential northern suburb. The address had been given to them a few days earlier over the telephone by a man who did not identify himself. He told them this address was a place where they could get a certain criminal service: abortion.

Mariana, then 23, was 10 weeks pregnant and desperate. She and Rafael, her boyfriend of six months, were students and had no way to financially support a baby. Making matters worse, Mariana came from a strict evangelical Christian family. “I hadn’t dared buy contraception because if my family found it they would know I was having sex,” she said. “If they found out I was pregnant they would have forced us to get married and would have been angry forever.”

On the day of Mariana’s abortion, Rafael handed over a bag containing 1,600 reais, about $575, to a group of men who approached their car. Then they ordered him to leave. “They would not give us any information about how the procedure would be done or who would perform it,” he said. “I knew she might die or end up with terrible complications. But that was the choice we had.”

Rafael was right to be scared. Hundreds of thousands of women are hospitalized each year following complications from illegal abortions in Brazil, where legal terminations are allowed only in very limited circumstances. Scores of them die.

For decades, Brazilian authorities tolerated underground clinics, but in recent years there has been a major crackdown, coinciding with an increasingly hard-line religious Congress. The result is that far more dangerous procedures are carried out by far more unscrupulous people, according to women’s health experts.

Read the full article at Foreign Policy now.

Catholic bishops not obliged to report clerical child abuse, Vatican says

Vatican guide says ‘not necessarily’ bishop’s duty to report suspects to police despite Pope Francis’s vows to redress Catholic church’s legacy of child abuse.

The Catholic church is telling newly appointed bishops that it is “not necessarily” their duty to report accusations of clerical child abuse and that only victims or their families should make the decision to report abuse to police.

A document that spells out how senior clergy members ought to deal with allegations of abuse, which was recently released by the Vatican, emphasised that, though they must be aware of local laws, bishops’ only duty was to address such allegations internally.

“According to the state of civil laws of each country where reporting is obligatory, it is not necessarily the duty of the bishop to report suspects to authorities, the police or state prosecutors in the moment when they are made aware of crimes or sinful deeds,” the training document states.

By Stephanie Kirchgaessner
Read the full article on The Guardian website

Zika, disease of the poor, may not change abortion in Brazil

Six months pregnant with her first child, Eritania Maria has a rash and a mild fever, symptoms of the Zika virus linked to brain deformities in newborn children in Brazil. But the 17-year-old is too scared to take a test to confirm if she has Zika.

Like other women in the slums of Recife, which squat on stilts over mosquito-ridden marshland in northeast Brazil, Maria has few options if her child develops microcephaly, the condition marked by an abnormally small head and underdeveloped brain that has been linked to Zika.

Brazil has amongst the toughest abortion laws in the world and is culturally conservative. Even if she wanted an illegal abortion and could afford one, Maria is too heavily pregnant for a doctor to risk it. So she prefers not to know.

“I’m too scared of finding out my baby will be sick,” she told Reuters, her belly poking out from beneath a yellow top.

The Zika outbreak has revived the debate about easing abortion laws but Maria’s case highlights a gap between campaigners and U.N. officials calling for change and Brazil’s poor, who are worst affected by the mosquito-borne virus yet tend to be anti-abortion.

Add a conservative Congress packed with Evangelical Christians staunchly opposed to easing restrictions, plus the difficulty of identifying microcephaly early enough to safely abort, and hopes for change seem likely to be frustrated.

As with many countries in mostly Roman Catholic Latin America, Brazil has outlawed abortion except in cases of rape, when the mother’s life is at risk or the child is too sick to survive.

An estimated 850,000 women in Brazil have illegal abortions every year, many under dangerous conditions. They can face up to 3 years in prison although in practice, jail terms are extremely rare.

With two-thirds of the population Catholic and support for Evangelicals growing fast, polls show Brazilians oppose changing the law. A survey by pollster VoxPopuli in 2010 showed that 82 percent reject decriminalization, while a Datafolha poll the same year put the figure at 72 percent.

Vandson Holanda, head of health for the Catholic Church in Brazil’s northeast, said there was no chance the Church would shift its position on abortion because of Zika.

Read the full article from Reuters

Tunisia’s single mothers still struggle to overcome stigma

The situation of unmarried mothers, faced with a delicate dilemma and deprived of rights, makes a telling allegory for modern Tunisia — a country increasingly liberated but that still promotes conservative values.

On one side, the mere existence of unmarried mothers breaks the great taboo of premarital sex. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center from 2013, 89% of Tunisians say sex outside of marriage is “morally wrong.” On the other side, a growing number of individuals are emancipating themselves from traditional family values.

This trend is mainly reflected in delayed marriage. In 2012, the average age of marriage was 28 for women and 33 for men, leading to an increase in premarital sex. According to psychoanalyst Nedra Ben Smail, who authored the book “Vierges? La nouvelle sexualité des Tunisiennes” (“Virgins? The new sexuality of Tunisian women”), only 20% of Tunisian women remain virgins until marriage.

Despite the country’s rapidly changing ways, Tunisia struggles to adapt its legislation to its modernizing society. In November 2011, 10 months after Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country, Souad Abderrahim, a female representative of the Islamist party Ennahda, called single mothers a “disgrace.” Her statement caused significant outrage in the media and on social networks. Articles were published in response on the award-winning collective blog Nawaat, while Tunisian activist Lina Ben Mhenni, a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, called Abderrahim’s declaration “outrageous.”

However, more than four years later, no real public debate has taken place on the issue. The country is ruled by President Beji Caid Essebsi, who was elected in December 2014 after a virulent anti-Islamist campaign against Ennahda, the governing party at the time. But Essebsi and his secular liberal party, Nidaa Tunis, allied with Ennahda just after the election. The two parties support conservative policies regarding moral issues, refusing to amend, for example, the law that criminalizes homosexuality.

Read the full article from Al Monitor

New Algerian law punishes violence against women

A new Algerian law came into effect this week punishing violence against women and sexual harassment, in a victory for feminist groups that had fought for years for the legislation.

The law, effective from Monday, had been blocked by the Senate for eight months amid resistance from conservative Muslims who view it as interference in family affairs.

It’s the fruit of a long struggle by feminist organizations in the North African country that have been fighting against a spike in attacks against women in recent years.

The article has the potential to be extremely robust in handing down heavy penalties for acts of domestic violence and also for harassment of women in the streets. It is aimed specifically at “the spouse.”

If a domestic attack prevents the woman from working for over 15 days, the perpetrator faces two to five years in prison.

If a woman is mutilated, or the violence causes loss of eyesight or a limb, or any sort of permanent damage, the law says the attackers could face from 10 to 20 years’ incarceration.

Officials say the 7,500 cases of violence against women reported in 2015 represent only 20 percent of the real number, since women prefer to stay silent rather than bring shame to their family.

By Aomar Ouali
Article originally published on the Star Tribune website