Category: Violent Extremism

‘Virginity Testing’ to End for Yezidi Rape Survivors

“Luna,” was captured by ISIS fighters when they swept through northern Iraq in August 2014.

She was sold four times and raped by all her “owners.” She was one of hundreds of Yezidi women and girls who had similar experiences.

Some of them eventually escaped and were reunited with their community, who took refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. But that wasn’t the end of their ordeal.

Survivors my colleague and I interviewed,  described  organized rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage by ISIS. They were in dire need of health care, counselling and other services to help them begin to recover from their ordeal.

Kurdistan officials took their needs seriously, but subjected some unmarried women and girls to “virginity tests” –an abusive and inaccurate procedure– as part of a forensic, post-rape examination.  Judge Ayman Bamerny, who heads a committee gathering evidence of ISIS crimes, told us these tests were seen as evidence of rape by Iraqi courts.

 

By Rothna Begum

Read the full article from Human Rights Watch

Lawyer faces death threats over petition for women to enter Sabarimala temple

The head of a lawyers group fighting for the right of women to enter the famous Sabarimala Ayyappa temple in Kerala said on Thursday he had received hundreds of death threats warning him to drop the petition in the Supreme Court.

The popular Hindu temple is one of a few in India which bar women of reproductive age, only allowing entry to girls aged under 10 and women over 50.

The ban came under legal scrutiny after the Indian Young Lawyers’ Association (IYLA) filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking entry for all women, prompting the court on Monday to ask temple authorities to explain the ban.

IYLA President Naushad Ahmed Khan said he had since received over 300 death threats on his cell phone – prompting police to provide him with a personal security guard.

“I have received more than 700 telephone calls, including some calls from international telephone, since Wednesday. These callers are (trying to) force me to withdraw the petition,” Khan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“I am the president of the IYLA, and the plea has been filed by the organisation. I have never been personally involved with this petition,” he said, adding that the question of whether the petition would be withdrawn had not arisen.

 

Reporting by Suchitra Mohanty, writing by Nita Bhalla, editing by Tim Pearce.
Read the full article from the Thomson Reuters Foundation

OURs - News piece

Counter-Terrorism Committee: Addressing the Role of Women in Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism

The UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS) has become the dominant discourse framing women’s engagement in international affairs over the past fifteen years.

It has also marshalled the ways in which women are both made visible by and remain invisible in security conversations by key institutional actors such as the United Nations.

In this same period, following the events of 9/11, states have brought new urgency and vibrancy to their action in the realm of counterterrorism. Indeed, creating and bolstering new international security regimes constitutes the bulwark of states’ normative actions in the international sphere. This international security system was ushered in by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373 and the creation of the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC), in conjunction with European Union Regulations on Combatting Terrorism. Both the EU and UN’s approaches had antecedents during prior decades of patchwork multilateral terrorism conventions and resolutions but their scope, content, and institutional power has risen considerably in the world we inhabit after 9/11.

State momentum stemming from the priority accorded to addressing international terrorism is illustrated by both the response of national legal systems and by more concerted efforts to achieve multilateral and multilevel counterterrorism efforts on the international plane. The central institutional legacy of that urgency is the CTC. Yet, by and large, the WPS agenda has been excluded from any meaningful engagement with the CTC since its creation. The result is that the WPS agenda has been not only normatively limited in its reach, but distinctly and institutionally peripheral in some of the key security and conflict discussions of the past decade plus.

 

By Fionnuala Ní Aoláin
Read the full article on the Just Security website