Women's rights around the world

Afghan women want “real, not just symbolic, rights.”
A Reuters report on a women’s rights conference held in Afghanistan, “a conference which would have been unthinkable under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban, but nevertheless underlined how far women have to go to achieve equal rights.” The women are demanding input into a new constitution and a guarantee of equal rights:

In a final declaration, the meeting called on the government to end discrimination and violence against women, and to ensure their rights were enshrined in a new constitution, a first draft of which is expected this month.

It also called for projects to help reduce illiteracy among women and to provide equal employment opportunities, including within the government.

The declaration said that planned legal reform should ensure women’s rights to divorce and citizenship and grant them equal political and economic rights.

It said that a body should be established to report on violations of women’s rights and that the new constitution should be approved by a committee of women’s organisations before final ratification.

Zero tolerance for female genital mutilation
Opposition for female genital mutilation (FGM) is often caricatured as a western imposition on African and Muslim cultures. In fact, as far as I can tell, everywhere in the world where FGM is practiced there are local women questioning or protesting FGM. Of course, it’s true that western feminist organizations have sometimes been ham-handed; but it’s not true that opposing FGM is just a Western thing. From the UN Wire:

African leaders and international organizations open a three-day conference today in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to urge zero tolerance for female genital mutilation, which the World Health Organization says has been performed on up to 140 million women and girls.

U.N. Helps Sterilize Mexicans Against Their Will
Abortion is too-often the only reproductive right talked about, but the right to choose to have children is just as important. From the National Catholic Reporter (and via Eve Tushnet):

More than 400 cases like hers have moved Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights to issue a harsh report Dec. 16 denouncing the fact that in all of Mexico’s 31 states health organizations have been imposing contraceptive devices on natives and peasants without their consent. The report mentions the United Nations and the Mexican Institute of Social Security in particular.

The commission’s report says it found that “medical personnel in public rural clinics force women to accept the use of intrauterine devices as a method of birth control” under threat of losing the help provided by government programs.

“This commission has also documented that medical and paramedic personnel of the ‘community health brigades’ working in areas of native population put pressure on the male population in order to obtain their consent for the application of irreversible methods [vasectomy] by promising them material goods and economic help…”

UN official: “Visiting brothels where women have been gang-raped into submission, into slavery, is not part of the UN’s mandate.”
This is an ongoing controversy (I blogged about this issue back in August), and I’m happy that it hasn’t faded away. Basically, UN human rights workers have too often been men who think of their occupation as a macho boy’s club, with every right to exploit non-first-world women. Thankfully, some UN folks – like Madeleine Rees, who is now officially my hero – don’t go along with it. From Scotland on Sunday:

Madeleine Rees, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia, has broken ranks to demand that UN officials, international peacekeepers and police who are involved in sex crimes be brought to justice in their home countries.

Speaking exclusively to Scotland on Sunday, the British lawyer has also launched an outspoken attack on her former boss. She accuses Jacques Paul Klein, the former head of the UN Mission in Bosnia, of not taking UN complicity in the country’s burgeoning sex trade seriously enough.

In recent years there has been a massive increase in the trafficking of women in Bosnia, including girls as young as 12. The women are taken from their homes in eastern Europe by organised criminal gangs and brought to Bosnia, where they are forced into prostitution.

The trade in these so-called ‘sex slaves’ hardly existed until the mid-1990s. It was fuelled by the arrival of tens of thousands of predominantly male UN personnel in the wake of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord by Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia in 1995.

31 Palestinian Women murdered in “honor” killings in 2002
You can always rely on the UN Wire for depressing news.

At least 31 Palestinian women were murdered in so-called honor killings in the West Bank and Gaza Strip last year, according to statistics released by Palestinian police last week. The victims, most of whom were under the age of 18, were killed by family members for perceived sexual misconduct that brought shame to the family, although in most cases the girls had been sexually abused or raped by relatives.

I’m as pro-Palestine liberation as anyone, but that doesn’t change the fact that Palestinian culture is, by and large, misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and basically deplorable.

Wal-Mart faces largest class action suit in history
The New York Times reports that plantiff’s lawyers in the Wal-Mart sex discrimination lawsuit “want the lawsuit to include all 700,000 women who worked at Wal-Mart from 1996 to 2001.”

In another expert’s report, William T. Bielby, a sociology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, found that women make up 89.5 percent of Wal-Mart’s cashiers, 79 percent of department heads, 37.6 percent of its assistant store managers and 15.5 percent of its store managers. The lawsuit claims that among 20 other large retailers, 57 percent of the managers were women. Hourly jobs at Wal-Mart pay an average of about $18,000 a year, while the average managerial job pays $50,000.

“There are enormous disparities in the rate of promotion for men and women in management,” said Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “There is strong evidence that the company is mistreating women because they are women.”

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