Women's Human Rights: World Report 2002 - events of 2001 - Women and Human Rights

WIN News, Spring, 2002

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, WOMEN'S RIGHTS DIVISION

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CONTENTS:

"Introduction // Human Rights Developments // Women's Status in the Family // Labor Rights // Trafficking // Women in Conflict and Refugees // Violence Against Women // The Role of the International Community: United Nations // United States // European Union // Council of Europe // Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) // Relevant Human Rights Watch Reports // Relevant Human Rights Watch Missions // About Human Rights Watch // The Women's Rights Division."

FROM THE INTRODUCTION:

"One of the greatest challenges of governments in 2001 was to make respect for women's rights a more permanent and central part of the international human rights agenda. Women's rights activists made notable progress on several fronts - leading governments to condemn sexual violence against women in armed conflict, holding governments accountable for failing to protect women from domestic violence, and forcing governments to acknowledge and treat trafficking as a human rights crisis. However, governments' reluctance to promote respect for women's rights systematically and thoroughly undercut these gains every day. Many governments' commitment to women's human rights remained at best tenuous and at worst nonexistent.

The international women's rights community moved forward, pressing to protect women's bodily integrity and right to sexual autonomy, to examine the ways that race or ethnicity and gender intersect to deny women human rights, and to protect women from gender-specific violations of the laws of war.

The September 11 attacks on the U.S. triggered an international debate about the motivation of the attackers and a just response. The U.S.-led military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan focused international attention on the plight of Afghans generally, and in particular on Afghan women. Governments in the U.S.-led coalition argued that the Taliban's behavior toward women - including banning women from most types of work, forcing women to wear a head-to-toe enveloping garment, and banning women from education beyond primary school - was unparalleled in severity and constituted a systematic attack on women's human rights and dignity. Yet, while the international community recoiled at these abuses, the women's human rights record of other governments with similar practices, such as Saudi Arabia received minimal criticism.

Critics of the Taliban virtually ignored Saudi Arabia, where women face systematic discrimination in all aspects of their lives: they are denied equality of opportunity in access to work, forced to comply with a restrictive dress code, and segregated in public life. Religious police punish infractions of the dress code with public beatings. Kuwait's record on women's rights is also dismal: the Kuwaiti government denies women the right to vote, segregates them, and requires them to veil in public.

The international community's lack of complaint about women's human rights underscored what women's rights activists grapple with everywhere: women's rights must still be negotiated, and violations of women's rights often generate only fleeting interest. Many governments attack women's rights in ways that essentially strip women of their legal personhood. For example, the governments of Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, and other African states deny women equal inheritance and property rights. The Thai government denies women who marry non-nationals the right to buy and own property in their own names. Egypt discriminates against women who marry non-nationals by refusing to allow them to transfer their nationality to their children. Syria conditions a woman's choice in marriage on the consent of a male family member.

Jordan and Pakistan condemn domestic violence but offered reduced sentences to males who commit 'honor' crimes against female family members. South Africa condemns sexual violence, but fails to take adequate steps to protect girls in school from widespread sexual violence at the hands of teachers and students. Guatemala passed sophisticated domestic violence legislation but lets stand discriminatory labor law provisions that deny tens of thousands of female domestic workers equality under the labor code. Nigeria deplores the treatment of trafficked Nigerians abroad, but does little at home to stop domestic trafficking of Nigerians.

The international women's human rights movement functioned as the antidote to government lack of commitment. In every arena, women's rights activists challenge governments' cursory commitment...

"Toward the end of 2000, in part as a result of an ongoing campaign by women's rights and peace activists to highlight the particular insecurity of women in times of armed conflict, both the U.N. Security Council and the European Parliament adopted resolutions on women and peace building, that explicitly called on governments to ensure that women participate both in peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction planning.