March 8, 2024 was again International Women’s Day

Like yearly, many organisations used the event to give attention to the function of girls human rights defenders. Right here a collection of this 12 months’s actions [for earlier posts see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/international-womens-day/]:

International Voices has launched a particular protection known as Empowering voices: Ladies in politics, which explores the state of girls’s political participation around the globe. 

Human Rights First referred to a brand new report reveals that WHRDs face growing harassment and threats from a world motion in opposition to gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights. The Kvinna until Kvinna Basis, a number one feminist girls’s rights group, launched Hope and Resistance Go Collectively: The State of Ladies Human Rights Defenders 2023,  a report that discovered discouraging progress in harassment of WHRDs.  The muse surveyed 458 girls’s and queer rights activists and interviewed 25 activists representing WHRDs from 67 international locations affected by violence or battle.

They discovered that 75% reported dealing with harassment for his or her activism, a 15% improve from two years in the past, and 25% of respondents have acquired dying threats. Most harassment comes from authorities authorities, however elevated harassment from far-right teams and anti-gender equality actors can be driving these startling statistics. Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) the world over face resistance and violence. In 2022, at the least 401 HRDs had been killed for his or her peaceable work. However among the obstacles dealing with WHRDs are distinct. https://humanrightsfirst.org/library/recognizing-women-human-rights-defenders-on-international-womens-day/

Human Rights Watch on 7 March carried a bit by Macarena Sáez who says inter alia:

On this Worldwide Ladies’s Day, we march for the one in three girls who expertise bodily or sexual violence of their lifetime. We cheer for international locations like Argentina, Colombia, and Eire that worth our autonomy to decide on to be pregnant and have legalized entry to secure abortion, whereas protesting that abortion remains to be or once more unlawful in lots of locations, together with US states like Alabama and Texas. On the identical time, we march to honor the ladies who marched earlier than us, just like the Mexican girls who organized the primary feminist congress in 1916 to push for household regulation reforms and their proper to vote, and the Nigerians who waged their “Ladies’s Warfare” in opposition to colonization and patriarchal legal guidelines in 1929. Their struggles sadly mirror the truth of many ladies around the globe at this time – particularly girls who belong to traditionally marginalized teams – who proceed to rally in opposition to violence and abuse.

Fearing the ability of girls’s solidarity and collective actions, governments have  stifled girls’s speech via restrictions on motion, censorship, smear campaigns, and prison prosecutions. In extremely repressive contexts, like Afghanistan and Iran, girls undergo arbitrary detention, and even enforced disappearance and torture, for his or her activism. In the meantime, social media corporations haven’t executed sufficient to guard girls from on-line violence, chilling girls’s freedom of expression on and offline.    These limitations make it onerous for girls’s equality to grow to be actuality. Gender justice requires an enabling surroundings through which girls can specific themselves, converse and unfold their political opinions, and take part in political and public life. As a substitute of repressing or tolerating the repression of girls, governments ought to acknowledge our collective actions – and consequent energy – and enshrine our rights in legal guidelines, insurance policies, and observe. [https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/07/womens-voices-have-power-drive-change]

Amnesty Worldwide on 8 March highlighted three outstanding girls who reveal why sexual and reproductive rights are a significant human rights problem : Charlotte Bunch, USA Leila Hessini, Algeria Marge Berer, UK [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2024/03/three-prominent-women-reveal-why-sexual-and-reproductive-rights-are-a-major-human-rights-issue/]

On 8 March 8, 2024 Almyra Luna Kamilla and Rosalind Ratana 
opined in IMHO on “Navigating the storms of repression: The resilience of younger girls rights defenders in Asia”

Lately, Asia has been witnessing rising authoritarianism and shrinking civic area. Amongst these within the frontlines of resistance are younger girls human rights defenders. As we rejoice Worldwide Ladies’s Day, allow us to demand for an enabling world the place girls human rights defenders can proceed their noble pursuits with out worry of reprisals.

In Thailand, the royal defamation regulation is being excessively used to silence criticisms in opposition to the monarchy. In the meantime in Sri Lanka, financial and political mismanagement has sparked peaceable protests which can be met with violence and intimidation. The destiny of Asia’s political local weather hangs by a thread as elections are held throughout many international locations, together with Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, South Korea, and Pakistan. Now greater than ever, governments throughout the area are discovering methods to solidify their energy, placing a fair tighter grip on civil society to the detriment of democracy and folks’s elementary rights and freedoms.

Regardless of such challenges, many are courageously talking out and taking collective motion to reclaim energy for the individuals. This consists of younger girls human rights defenders – or Youth WHRDs – who’re claiming area to name out human rights violations and to demand accountability from oppressive governments. [https://www.rappler.com/voices/imho/young-women-rights-defenders-asia/]

The Alliance for Human Rights in Afghanistan (a coalition of 9 main NGOs) urgently appealed to the worldwide neighborhood to considerably bolster its help and actively safeguard the human rights of Afghan girls and women, together with Afghan girls human rights defenders who face persecution for his or her peaceable campaigns for rights and fundamental freedoms.

In 2023, the Taliban additional intensified its oppressive insurance policies towards girls, women, the LGBTIQ+ neighborhood, and non secular minorities. Afghan girls and women have seen their rights and prospects more and more curtailed, from better enforcement of restrictions on training – together with a ban on women attending secondary faculties and universities – to intensifying exclusion of girls from political and public life. Ladies have been banned from a rising record of types of paid employment, and financial limitations, such because the ban on girls registering organisations and present process vocational coaching, have contributed to a pointy decline in girls’s participation within the labour market, impeding their proper to make a dwelling. This exacerbates monetary insecurity, widens gender disparities, and additional confines girls to the non-public sphere. Lesbian, bisexual, and transgender girls face extreme threats, together with torture, sexual violence, compelled marriage, and dying. Victims of gender violence, together with those that determine as such, lack minimal authorized and sensible help. Obstacles to healthcare and training have exacerbated poverty and vulnerability amongst girls and women. In 2023, new discriminatory restrictions imposed by the Taliban included the closure of all magnificence salons, blocking girls from abroad journey for examine, mandating feminine well being employees in some areas to have a male chaperone whereas travelling or at work, and prohibiting girls from coming into a well-known nationwide park.

The oppressive surroundings extends to feminine activists, NGO leaders and journalists. Notable instances embody the arrests of girls’s rights activists Neda Parwani and Zholia Parsi, the enforced disappearance and subsequent discovery of Manizha Seddiqi in Taliban custody up to now, the arrest of Matiullah Wesa, founding father of an NGO advocating for women’ training rights, and the arbitrary detainment of Ahmad Fahim Azimi and Seddiqullah Afghan—each devoted women’ training activists, amongst many others. Journalists reporting on the Taliban, dealing with arrests and threats, equally illustrate the difficulties encountered by the media, significantly girls, when overlaying crimes in opposition to girls or advocating for girls’s rights. Collectively, these instances underscore the near-total denial of freedom of expression, gender equality, or another internationally acknowledged proper in Afghanistan below the Taliban.

Amid this rising oppression, segregation and worry, Afghan girls human rights defenders have urged the worldwide neighborhood to exert better strain on the Taliban. They name on worldwide our bodies to contain Afghan girls in all negotiations with the Taliban and to facilitate direct conferences between girls and the de facto authorities to deal with their considerations. Afghan girls have additionally confused the significance of advocacy for girls’s rights by exterior actors based mostly on the voices and realities of girls inside Afghanistan. They name for coordinated efforts between organisations inside and outdoors the nation to defend the rights of Afghan girls and women.

https://www.omct.org/en/sources/statements/afghanistan-lifting-afghan-women-from-the-shadows-into-the-light-in-the-face-of-the-taliban

The UN Particular Rapporteur on the scenario of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, known as on the Taliban to launch girls human rights defenders because the world marks Worldwide Ladies’s Day.

I reiterate my attraction to the Taliban to respect all of the human rights of girls and women in Afghanistan, together with to training, work, freedom of motion and expression, and their cultural rights, and I urge the significant and equal participation of Afghan girls and women in all features of public life. I name on the Taliban to right away and unconditionally launch all those that have been arbitrarily detained for defending human rights, particularly the rights of girls and women.”

https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2024/03/afghanistan-un-expert-calls-taliban-release-women-human-rights-defenders

On 8 March, Civil Rights Defenders introduced 4 lady human rights defenders and requested them to share their message to girls around the globe.

On Worldwide Ladies’s Day, the a gaggle of NGOs (ALQST for Human Rights, Amnesty Worldwide, CIVICUS, European Saudi Group for Human Rights (ESOHR), Entrance Line Defenders, Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement, Worldwide Service for Human Rights (ISHR),MENA Rights Group, Salam for Democracy and Human Rights) renewed their name on Saudi Arabian authorities to launch all girls human rights defenders (WHRDs), girls’s rights activists and their supporters who’re detained in contravention of worldwide human rights requirements. The organisations additional name on Saudi authorities to carry journey bans imposed on WHRDs and their family, and to abolish the male guardianship system. [https://ishr.ch/latest-updates/civil-society-reiterates-their-call-on-saudi-authorities-to-release-jailed-womens-rights-activists/]

The President of Georgia awarded severl with mesla of honor: co-founder of “Safari” group Babutsa Pataraia, human rights defender Ana Arganashvili, founders of “Nationwide Community for Safety from Violence”: Eliso Amirejibi and Nato Shavlakadze and founding father of “Vedzeb” group Tamar Museridze.

https://www.interpressnews.ge/en/article/130159-in-connection-with-the-international-womens-day-the-president-awarded-five-female-human-rights-defenders-with-medals-of-honor

This entry was posted on March 8, 2024 at 18:30 and is filed below Amnesty worldwide, Civil Rights Defenders (NGO), FIDH, Human Rights Council, Human Rights Defenders, ISHR, OMCT.

Tags: Afghanistan, Alliance for Human Rights in Afghanistan, Georgia, International Voices, Hope and Resistance Go Collectively: The State of Ladies Human Rights Defenders 2023, human rights, Human Rights Defenders, human rights of girls, worldwide girls’s day, joint assertion, information, NGOs, Richard Bennett, Saudi Arabia, Taliban, Uganda, lady human rights defender, Ladies’s rights