Recently in International Category

Following, Roja's two posts on the raid and closure of Shirin Ebadi's organization - Defenders of Human Rights Center - in late December (here and here ), just a quick note to update via the Women's Learning Partnership:

The situation of Nobel peace laureate and human rights defender Shirin Ebadi grows increasingly critical. Over the last two weeks the organization she heads, Defenders of Human Rights Center, was shut down, false accusations of tax evasion were made against her in the media, her private law offices were raided and confidential case files seized, and on January 1st a mob of 150 demonstrated in front of her house in an orchestrated attempt to connect her to the Israeli actions in Gaza. Protestors began kicking the door to her home and vandalized the exterior of her property in an attempt to further intimidate her.

A coalition of over 80 organizations and activists are calling on the Iranian government to cease its actions against Ebadi, and guarantee her safety and access to civil and political rights. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has also issued a statement of concern.

Find out more, see who's part of the coalition already, and add your voice to the campaign via this page .

For those who may not be regular readers, I thought I would share the recent writings of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. His most recent article can be found here. (Warning: It's a painful read). 

For his past three or four columns, he has been writing about conditions surrounding the trafficking of young girls in Cambodia. It began with an article about the school his family has built there, and has henceforth branched out to explore brothels and prostitution in Cambodia, most especially reflecting upon young girls kept as slaves. 

I may need to climb up on my soapbox for a moment here. 

We here in the west have just celebrated our main holiday season. There was Christmas, a time to reflect on the idea of God becoming Man, or a time to reconnect with the things that are most important in our lives. Hanukkah, a remembrance of God's goodness and provision. Kwanzaa, a celebration of culture and thanksgiving. 

And yet, we were encouraged to buy televisions, video game systems, new cars, ipods, ugly and mass-produced jewelry. It's as if our language of love has been tainted and reduced to the crude exchange of material goods as a substitute for what truly matters. And we pat ourselves on the back for "doing something good" for others during the holidays-- like emptying out our overstocked pantries and donated the almost-expired items to the local food bank, like cleaning out our closets of the crap we got last year to make room for the crap that will come from this year. 

"Christmas costs less at Walmart." As if Christmas is a commodity I must purchase before enjoying. 

"Chase What Matters," says a credit card company, reducing the things that matter to those which can be bought and sold.

I feel ill. I literally feel sick to my stomach, and I can feel the back of my throat tightening. 

Why are we not outraged by this? Why are mothers and fathers with daughters sitting still on a mass scale? Why is it okay that these horrors can happen to other people's daughters but not our own?

We have so sadly forgotten that we belong to one another. That what affects my brother or my sister affects me and my world. 

I feel so helpless in my anger. I feel as if I am beating against a glass box, that the sound cannot escape, that I am trapped alone with this rage against injustice, stupidity, and disrespect for the divinity of the human soul. 

We have forgotten that we belong to one another. 

Accroding to Change for Equaltiy , On Monday December 29, 2008 at 5:30 in the afternoon (equivalent to 5:30 AM Pacific Time in the US)  the private law office of Shirin Ebadi , Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Lawyer and human rights defender, was stormed by 5 security officers identifying themselves as tax officials, who presented a letter allowing them to take two computers.

Shirin Ebadi has however refused to surrender her case files and computers to these officials citing the confidential nature of the work of lawyers, especially human rights lawyers, and that the act of surrendering client files to government officials would breach that confidentiality. These security officials are presently in Ms. Ebadi’s private law office and engaged in search of the premises and seizure of property.

Ebadi is also a founding member of Nobel Women's Initiative .

Here is my scond attempt at blogging about current feminist issues that come up in Iran. But frist let's remember:

1- Iranian women are university professors, parliament representatives, heart surgeons, lawyers and journalists. We are not trapped in our homes, and we do not ride on camels either. 2- there is still a lot of discrimination against women in Iran. 3- Iranian feminists are very active right now.

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So here is one of the latest issues that Iranian feminists have been trying to fight: university admissions based on gender. How? Until this day, an Iranian woman could pass the unified entrance exam to universities and if her ranking was good, she could apply to and study in a city and province of her choice. Now the government wants to change this so women (and ONLY women) are admitted more easlity to their local universities and less easily in farther universities. So young woman (and only woman) are kept close to their families. Meaning that a bright young woman from a far-away province will not be easily admitted to the top university in the capital.

this is supposed to be for women's "protection." but there are a lot of people (men and women) who are really against this.

here is a translation of an article written by an Iranian feminist in a great feminist website called the Feminist School (also part of the one million signatures campaign). The translation is not 100% smooth, but it's worth readig if you want to hear these first hand from Iranians (and feminists) inside Iran.

Grooms take part in a mass wedding ceremony in Riyadh in June. Governor of Riyadh Prince Salman and a local group organized a mass wedding for about 1600 couples to help people unable to afford expensive ceremonies "She doesn't know yet that she has been married," Jtili said then of the girl who was about to begin her fourth year at primary school. Relatives who did not wish to be named said that the marriage had not yet been consummated, and that the girl continued to live with her mother.They said that the father had set a verbal condition by which the marriage is not consummated for another 10 years, when the girl turns 18.

The father had agreed to marry off his daughter for an advance dowry of £5,000, as he was apparently facing financial problems, they said. The father was in court and he remained adamant in favour of the marriage, they added. Mr Jtili said he was going to appeal the verdict at the court of cassation, the supreme court in the ultra-conservative kingdom which applies Islamic Sharia law in its courts.

Arranged marriages involving pre-adolescents are occasionally reported in the Arabian Peninsula, including in Saudi Arabia where the strict conservative Wahabi version of Sunni Islam holds sway and polygamy is common. In Yemen in April, another girl aged eight was granted a divorce after her unemployed father forced her to marry a man of 28.

Via.

Shirin Ebadi's human rights law offices were raided and indefinitely closed down by Iranian authorities today. Ebadi and her law offices have been strong supporters of human rights and women's rights activists in Iran. Many feminist activists are clients of her law office.

according to the International Campaign for Human rights in Iran:

The DHRC, which was founded by Ebadi, who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, and other prominent Iranian human rights defenders in 2000, planned to hold the 60th anniversary celebration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at their Tehran office on December 21.

[...]

Narges Mohammadi, DHRC’s spokesperson, told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that nearly 300 human rights defenders and supporters had been invited to the private celebration. She said a few hours before the start of the program, at around 3 p.m., she arrived at DHRC’s office to find dozens of police, members of state security forces, and plainclothes agents attempting to enter the building.

[...]

DHRC’s mission statement describes its primary duties as “pro-bono legal defense of prisoners of conscience,” “supporting families of prisoners of conscience,” and “documentation and reporting of human rights abuses.”

Closure of Nobel Laureate’s Rights Group

CNN report

The following is an excerpt from a 4 page in depth story about the increase of slavery around the world. It begins with a description of exactly how one can travel 500 miles from N.Y. to buy a slave for labor and or sex. the entire article, titled The World Enslaved can be found here.

There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. True abolition will elude us until we admit the massive scope of the problem, attack it in all its forms, and empower slaves to help free themselves." ... "The West’s efforts have been, from the outset, hamstrung by a warped understanding of slavery. In the United States, a hard-driving coalition of feminist and evangelical activists has forced the Bush administration to focus almost exclusively on the sex trade. The official State Department line is that voluntary prostitution does not exist, and that commercial sex is the main driver of slavery today. In Europe, though Germany and the Netherlands have decriminalized most prostitution, other nations such as Bulgaria have moved in the opposite direction, bowing to U.S. pressure and cracking down on the flesh trade. But, across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, unregulated escort services are exploding with the help of the Internet. Even when enlightened governments have offered clearheaded solutions to deal with this problem, such as granting victims temporary residence, they have had little impact. Many feel that sex slavery is particularly revolting—and it is. I saw it firsthand. In a Bucharest brothel, for instance, I was offered a mentally handicapped, suicidal girl in exchange for a used car. But for every one woman or child enslaved in commercial sex, there are at least 15 men, women, and children enslaved in other fields, such as domestic work or agricultural labor. Recent studies have shown that locking up pimps and traffickers has had a negligible effect on the aggregate rates of bondage. And though eradicating prostitution may be a just cause, Western policies based on the idea that all prostitutes are slaves and all slaves are prostitutes belittles the suffering of all victims. It’s an approach that threatens to put most governments on the wrong side of history...

I found this article at the Huffpo

The dancing girls of Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan, are on strike in protest against the tide of Talibanisation that is threatening to destroy an art form that has flourished since the Mughal empire.

The strike, which is supported by the theatres where they perform, was sparked by the decision of Lahore High Court last month to ban the Mujra, the graceful and elaborate dance first developed in the Mughal courts 400 years ago, on the grounds that it is too sexually explicit.

"The Mujra by its very nature is supposed to be a seductive dance," says Badar Alam, a cultural expert. He recalls that attempts were made to ban it during the 1980s. "Gradually, it returned to commercial theatre, mostly by paying off officials. The question remains: does the government have the right to engage in moral policing?"

Recently, Italy passed a law requiring all Roma to be fingerprinted. Today Sylvia Poggioli of NPR delivered more chilling news. Ms. Poggioli's report was one of the best I've heard in years, so I recommend people to check it out for themselves. Here are some factoids: "Opinion polls indicate that the showgirl is the No. 1 role model for young Italian women" and "Today, Italy has the lowest percentage of working women in Europe. Only 2 percent of top management positions are held by women -- that's even behind Kuwait -- and only 17 percent of the members of parliament are women -- less than in Rwanda and Burundi." Most recently, a neo-fascist was elected mayor of Rome.

This is great news and these sorts of pressures do make a difference.

Via Reuters:

U.N. human rights investigators called on Iran Thursday to end what they called a "crackdown" on women's rights activists who have been harassed and detained for seeking equal status in the Islamic Republic.

Women and men involved in a grassroots movement to collect 1 million signatures to demand full equality between women and men in Iran have been "particularly targeted," they said.

"Over the past two years, women's rights defenders have faced an increasingly difficult situation and harassment in the course of their non-violent activities," the two independent experts said in a statement.

Some have been prevented from travelling in the ongoing "serious repression," according to Margaret Sekaggya, U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, and Yakin Erturk, special rapporteur on violence against women.

Dozens of activists were detained since the launch of a campaign in 2006 to demand changes to laws denying women equal rights in matters such as divorce and child custody. Most were freed after a few days or weeks.