Ipas
The longstanding provider-patient confidentiality relationship is quietly eroding as an alarming number of medical staff across Latin America are reporting women and girls to the police for having abortions. Many countries now require, protect or encourage medical providers to breach their confidentiality duties when they treat women seeking postabortion care.
This publication covers the three main ways health-care providers are compelled to breach confidentiality, based on the varying Latin American laws governing provider obligations on the issue of abortion. It also details how such laws impact both providers and women, and lists the many international bodies, declarations, consensus documents, etc. that establish standards for protecting patient confidentiality. Finally, the publication provides recommendations for international human rights bodies, governments and health-care professionals to protect women’s right to confidentiality as well as providers’ ethical obligation to uphold that right.
Ipas
This publication provides evidence and explanation for why Ipas urges governments and policymakers to ensure that all young women—including survivors of sexual violence—have access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care, including safe abortion services.
Ipas
This factsheet for advocates and policymakers explains how The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development can be a powerful tool for advancing adolescent girls’ and young women’s sexual and reproductive rights—especially their right to safe, legal abortion.
The publication includes explanations of how specific goals and targets within the development agenda apply to women’s right to safe abortion, as well as specific recommendations for how to hold governments accountable to these goals.
This resource is primarily intended to help legal and policy advocates use the concept of privacy to support providers in guaranteeing women’s right to confidential abortion care. Health-care professionals may also find the resource provides useful guidelines on protecting patient privacy.
Included is a review of providers’ ethical obligations to maintain confidentiality, a review of human rights protections related to privacy in health care, and an analysis of how confidentiality is treated in different national laws. This resource will also show that requiring providers to report women suspected of obtaining unlawful abortions violates protections of privacy and confidentiality under international human rights law.
GENEVA (8 March 2016) – The right to sexual and reproductive health is not only an integral part of the general right to health but fundamentally linked to the enjoyment of many other human rights, including the rights to education, work and equality, as well as the rights to life, privacy and freedom from torture, and individual autonomy, UN experts have said in an authoritative new legal commentary, the General Comment on the Right to Sexual and Reproductive Health.
Yet, the experts from the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) note, “the full enjoyment of the right to sexual and reproductive health remains a distant goal for millions of people, especially for women and girls, throughout the world.”
The commentary, adopted by CESCR’s 18 independent members, highlights the numerous legal, procedural, practical and social barriers people face in accessing sexual and reproductive health care and information, and the resulting human rights violations.
“For example, lack of emergency obstetric care services or denial of abortion often lead to maternal mortality and morbidity, which in turn constitutes a violation of the right to life or security, and in certain circumstances, can amount to torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” the experts say in their commentary.
The full General Comment from CESCR is available here: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/089/32/PDF/G1608932.pdf
This brief from the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) provides the human rights-based response to arguments that employ religion, culture, and tradition as justifications for gender-based discrimination and violence. The brief revolves around five main points:
- All human rights are universal and interrelated.
- Invocations of culture, religion and tradition can never justify violations of human rights.
- States have an obligation to abolish any laws, customs or practices that discriminate against women.
- Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and belief.
- Cultural diversity can only be protected when human rights are upheld.
The myths exposed in this publication come from the experiences of more than 1,600 women’s rights activists who responded to AWID’s Resisting and Challenging Religious Fundamentalisms survey, as well as 51 key experts who were interviewed for the project.
This publication is about the top ten myths common to all regions and religions covered in AWID’s research. They can be countered by holding religious fundamentalists accountable for what they say and do, and by ensuring that our analysis most closely matches the lived experiences of women’s rights activists.
- Myth #1: Religious fundamentalisms are about the fundamentals of religion
- Myth #2: Religious fundamentalisms are only about politics
- Myth #3: Religious fundamentalisms are like any other political force
- Myth #4: Religious fundamentalists are those backward extremists
- Myth #5: Religious fundamentalisms exist in only some religions or regions
- Myth #6: Religious fundamentalisms promote clean politics and honesty
- Myth #7: Religious fundamentalisms stand for the poor and the downtrodden
- Myth #8: Religious fundamentalisms are family- friendly and pro-life
- Myth #9: Religious fundamentalisms defend our traditional ways and authentic identities
- Myth #10: Religious fundamentalisms are invincible
This statement by Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights (CSBR) of March 2016 urges President Joko Widodo to unequivocally come out in support of Indonesia’s LGBTIQ citizens, to uphold democratic rights and ensure protection from discrimination and harassment, and to call for an end to the hateful and discriminatory rhetoric being propagated by government officials.
The statement came as a response to an increasingly hostile climate spreading across different cities and provinces in Indonesia. CSBR is a coalition of over 30 civil society organizations and academic institutions working to uphold sexual and bodily rights in Muslim societies.
Speaking ahead of the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia on 17 May, a group of United Nations and international human rights experts* call for an urgent end to the pathologization of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) adults and children.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, a group of UN human rights experts, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe urge Governments worldwide to reform medical classifications and to adopt measures to prevent all forms of forced treatments and procedures on LGBT persons.
A statement from International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), stating that gender diversity is not a pathology, and that no pre-pubertal child should ever be given a diagnosis because of their gender identity or gender expression.
