Archives: Resources

This report, authored by Mariam Armisen, maps the growth of LGBTQ organizing in West Africa, highlighting challenges and opportunities.

The research provides an overview of LGBTQ organizing in a large and diverse region, drawing upon a wide range of perspectives and experiences of local activists and organizations. Though funding for LGBTQ activism in West Africa has historically focused on gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM), the scan shows that more broad-based LGBTQ organizations are emerging. Several of these nascent groups are led by queer-identified women and gender non-conforming people.

Commissioned by a group of funders and activists, We Exist: Mapping LGBTQ Organizing in West Africa, is part of an exploratory and participatory process to shape the creation of a new, LGBTQ activist-led fund in West Africa. The research engaged a total of 50 groups and 180 activists from nine countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo.

The scan is unique in bringing together viewpoints from Francophone and Anglophone countries and capturing the differences and commonalities for LGBTQ organizing among them. It outlines the supportive roles that local technical assistance providers and international organizations have been playing. The research also sheds light on the achievements of a growing movement that has received relatively little attention to date.

The report concludes with stakeholders’ recommendations for the priorities and management of a fund led by West African LGBTQ activists.

World Health Organization

Fact Sheet: FGM

Key facts

• Female genital mutilation (FGM) includes procedures that intentionally alter or cause injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.
• The procedure has no health benefits for girls and women.
• Procedures can cause severe bleeding and problems urinating, and later cysts, infections, as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths.
• More than 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is concentrated¹.
• FGM is mostly carried out on young girls between infancy and age 15.
• FGM is a violation of the human rights of girls and women.

World Health Organization

Health and Human Rights

Fact Sheet No. 323

Key facts

• The WHO Constitution enshrines “…the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being.”
• The right to health includes access to timely, acceptable, and affordable health care of appropriate quality.
• Yet, about 100 million people globally are pushed below the poverty line as a result of health care expenditure ever year.
• Vulnerable and marginalized groups in societies tend to bear an undue proportion of health problems.
• Universal health coverage is a means to promote the right to health.

The Witchcraft and Human Rights Information Network

In many countries throughout the world, being accused of witchcraft, black magic or other forms of evil, can result in serious violations of human rights including, at the most extreme, torture and death.

Women, children, the disabled and the elderly are particularly vulnerable to these forms of abuse. This is still a world-wide phenomenon that remains largely unrecognised: The extent and distribution of it is largely unknown and, as yet, no formal mechanism exists to record, monitor or respond to such violations.

To establish an idea of the global spread of the various spiritual beliefs that result in violations of human rights, WHRIN monitored online media reports in 2013 of cases of abuse and the interventions that have been carried out by governments, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and human rights activists.

This report represents a systematic attempt to assess the scale of the problem worldwide and responses to it.

Women Living Under Muslim Laws

Control and Sexuality by Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Vanja Hamzić examines zina laws in some Muslim contexts and communities in order to explore connections between the criminalisation of sexuality, gender-based violence and women’s rights activism. The Violence is Not Our Culture Campaign and the Women Living Under Muslim Laws network present this comparative study and feminist analysis of zina laws as a contribution to the broader objective of ending violence in the name of ‘culture’.

It is hoped that the publication will help activists, policy-makers, researchers and other civil society actors acquire a better understanding of how culture and/or religion are invoked to justify laws that criminalise women’s sexuality and subject them to cruel, inhuman and degrading forms of punishment.

“It is most timely that this publication should emerge when issues of culture and human rights are being debated in many venues in the international arena: within the United Nations; in national and transnational, mainstream and alternative media outlets; and across social and political movements. “Some cultural practices may be particularly detrimental to the rights of women and girls. All harmful practices, regardless of provenance and justification, must be eliminated. All human rights are universal, indivisible and inter-related. It is my hope that by building upon the progressive, equitable and just aspects of culture which are inherent to all, this book can make a substantial contribution towards the promotion of rights, under law and custom.” Farida Shaheed, UN Independent Expert on Cultural Rights

Women Living Under Muslim Laws

from Dossier 17: Fundamentalisms and Sexuality

By Ayesha Imam

Women Living Under Muslim Laws

Fundamentalist political movements and their onslaught on women have been subject to much debate over the years and have become one of the key concerns of the WLUML network.

Table of Contents

The War Against Feminism in the Name of the Almighty: Making Sense of Gender and Muslim Fundamentalism

Women and Politics in Post-Islamist Iran: the Gender Conscious Drive to Change

Hojjat al-Eslam Sa‘idzadeh – Iran

Foundations of the Equality Perspective Modern Fiqh: the Case of Divorce

Iran’s moral enforcers beat a retreat

Mullahs, Migrants, Miracles: Travel and Transformation in Sylhet (Bangladesh)

Sri Lanka Ethnic Identity, Religious Fundamentalism and Muslim Women In Sri Lanka

Muslim Women on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century

Women Living Under Muslim Laws & Institute for Women’s Empowerment

This book presents the strategies used by partners to advance women’s rights in the face of culturally justified disempowerment and discusses their implementation in different contexts and in different thematic areas.

This compilation is intended as a living resource, which will be amended and added to as women and organisations apply the strategies listed here to their own contexts, or try out new ones.

It is, moreover, intended as a basis for exchanges, cooperation and solidarity, showing that women in very different countries and societies face similar forms of oppression, and that coordinated action is vital for resistance and change  in a connected world.

Women Living Under Muslim Laws

This third and completely revised version of the “Knowing Our Rights” handbook is an essential resource for those taking a critical and questioning approach to rights, laws, and constructions of womanhood in Muslim countries and communities and beyond.

“Knowing Our Rights” forms part of the international synthesis of the Women & Law in the Muslim world Programme and is based on some 10 years of field experience, research and analysis by multi-disciplinary teams of networkers in over 20 countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Women Living Under Muslim Laws