By the time you finish reading this post, one woman will have died due to conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth. Around the world, one woman dies every 90 seconds in pregnancy or childbirth-that’s more than 350,000 women every year. And here in the United States, more than two women die every day.
These deaths are a human rights violation. Why? Because women are not dying of diseases that doctors cannot cure, but because societies have yet to decide that their lives are worth saving.
As part of our celebration of International Women’s Day, we recognize the women all around the world who die while trying to give life.
In the United States, women have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than women in 49 other countries, including Kuwait, Bulgaria, and South Korea. In addition, African American women are nearly four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women. Amnesty International found that most of these deaths could have been prevented with access to good quality health care.
Sometimes referred to as an International Bill of Rights for women, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is the most comprehensive international treaty on basic human rights for women.
It offers countries a practical blueprint to promote basic rights and open opportunities for women and girls in all areas of society. It is a useful tool to reduce violence and discrimination against women and girls, ensure girls and women receive the same access as boys and men to education and health care, and secure basic legal recourse for women and girls against violations and abuses of their human rights.
CEDAW has led to concrete changes for women in key areas; ending violenceand traffickingin women and girls, improving conditions for women’s economic opportunity, increasing women’s political participation, and advancing human rights of women by promoting equality.
In countries that have ratified CEDAW, women have partnered with their governments to engage in a national dialogue about the status of women and girls, and as a result have shaped policies to create greater safety and opportunity for women and their families. For example:
By Widney Brown, Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Law and Policy
Women protestors, Cairo, 28 January 2011. Photo by Sarah Carr
One hundred years ago, more than a million people marched in streets across Europe on the first International Women’s Day, calling for an end to discrimination and for women to have the same rights as men to work, vote and shape the future of their countries.
One hundred years on, the reality is that women are still much more likely to be poor. They are more likely to be illiterate. They earn only 10 per cent of the world’s income but do two thirds of the world’s work. They produce up to 80 per cent of the food in developing countries but own only one per cent of the land.
In many countries, they are still told what they can do, even what they can wear. Women in Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Iran face harassment if they don’t observe conservative religious dress codes. Muslim women in Belgium, France and some parts of Spain may soon break the law there if they do.
Women campaigning for change are often met with derision, abuse or worse. In places like Russia, the Philippines, Mexico and Nepal, leading activists have recently been murdered for speaking out. In China, Bangladesh, India, Zimbabwe and many other countries, they are routinely detained and tortured.
A flash mob is a” group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and sometimes seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment and/or satire.” Flash mobs might be pointless and designed to entertain, but Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) borrowed the concept today for a very different purpose.
To commemorate International Women’s Day, 500 dedicated WOZA and MOZA (Men of Zimbabwe Arise) activists formed “flash protests” in downtown Bulawayo. Unlike typical WOZA protests where activists sing, march and converge on a central target where they practice peaceful civil disobedience in the face of police presence, today five individual protests sprang up and dispersed as soon as police presence appeared. There was a reason today’s protests were different-Zimbabwe police continue to actively target WOZA members.
Just this past weekend, four more members were arrested at private homes, detained for two nights and beaten by police. One woman, a nursing mother, was unable to hold or feed her child when visited by family members. Today WOZA reported high numbers of police presence who accused them of trying to incite a revolution. Following dispersal by police, the protestors went to the local court in solidarity with the four women being detained. They were victorious-the magistrate dropped all charges.
The flash protests, WOZA demanded President Zuma of South Africa take a more active stance in his role as guarantor of Zimbabwe’s negotiated unity government and end the violence. Amnesty is making a similar call to President Zuma to ensure political violence does not escalate further and elections are free and fair. Raise your voice with WOZA and send a message to President Zuma. Tell him there should be no voting violence in Zimbabwe.
Wow! International Women’s Day is celebrating 100 years of women’s empowerment and progress towards complete gender equality! To celebrate this momentous benchmark, Amnesty International USA plans to kick off the first full week of March with a series of blog posts highlighting the work we continue to do address women’s human rights issues.
International Women’s Day represents two sides of the push for women’s rights: one is a celebration of how far we’ve come, and the other is a reinvigoration of the push for total gender equality.
For years, Amnesty has been striving to ensure universal rights for all women – focusing specifically on ending violence against women, including the violence and sexual assault perpetrated against Indigenous women in the U.S. As we expanded our work to include the broad spectrum of economic, social, and cultural rights, we have taken on the daunting task of fighting for those human rights violations that are both a cause and consequence of poverty.
I always find today, International Women’s Day, incredibly inspiring but this year my source of motivation was the 54th UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) which began on March 1st and runs until March 12th. I had the chance to attend this year and find out what it is all about.
This year, the CSW focused on progress towards achievement of the commitments made in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action which was adopted by 189 governments 15 years ago. Over the 12 days, in addition to the official meetings of member states, there are parrellel events hostedby NGOs covering a diverse range of issues from women and climate change to women’s political participation from female condoms to women and the economic crisis. CSW is a chance to meet and hear participants from around the world speak about their work and their view of progress made to achieving the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action’s objective to achieve women’s empowerment, the full realization of women’s rights and substantive gender equality.
It was evident that whilst some progress has been made in the 15 years that have passed since Beijing – there is certainly much more to be done.
For instance, the prevention and elimination of violence against women – a Beijing commitment – is far from fulfilled. Amnesty highlighted the challenges to preventing violence globally during an interesting parallelevent on Obstacles to Justice for Violence Against Women at which the findings of our research on violence against women in Uganda, Cambodia and Nordic countries were presented. What was evident about these research findings was that regardless of the wealth of the country, the status of women in public life, the religion or the ethnicity of the people, violence against women is a global phenomenonthat rears its ugly head in homes, in schools and on the streets in every country in the world. The obstacles to justice include stigma associated with reporting crimes and speaking out against what is considered a “private” or “family” matter. All of the panelists gave accounts of women who had been laughed out of the police station or shamed into silence. Too often, police or judicial officials are not aware of the appropriate response to complaints or even the national laws that exist to prevent and protect survivors of violence. The practice of violence against women is often tolerated or, worse still, condoned by society which reflects the gender inequality and discrimination against women which is pervasive in many societies. Gender discrimination in itself creates an obstacle to justice which must be overcome.
Today, Amnesty launches a Six point Checklist on Justice for Violence Against Women which is a valuable resource for activists and advocates seeking to improve the judicial response to violence against women and identify laws policies and practices which need to be reformed. Whilst the events at CSW demonstrated that more needs to be done to eliminate violence against women, it is also evident that the world over, there are activists working tirelessly to put an end to the violence and dismantle these obstacles. A young woman activist from Nigeria in the audience at the Amnesty event said that her community creates obstacles “..they point at me for speaking out…” she said. In the face of such hostility from her friends and neighbors she continues to demand an end to violence against women and she inspired me to do the same.
On the outset, it seemed like March was going to be a great time for women. This month, we celebrated International Women’s Day recognizing women’s social achievements and ongoing struggles in pursuit of economic, social, and political justice. Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton came together to recognize women’s human rights activists. And President Obama signed an executive order establishing a White House Council for Women and Girls. Yes, ma’am! This is our month! And just days later, the nation has come to focus on … Meghan McCain’s dress size. Oh.
By now, most people know about the fight that conservative talk-show host Laura Ingraham and wannabe-political-pundit Meghan (daughter of none other) McCain are having in the public sphere. For those of you who had the pleasure of missing it, I’ll spare you the discomfort of reliving it through Google. The synopsis: Laura, in the process of addressing Meghan’s lack of credentials, infers that Meghan is overweight. A rightly offended Meghan addresses the attack with the 2-prong-Jennifer-Love-Hewitt approach: You shouldn’t attack me, and all women, by focusing on my weight. Besides, I’m a size 8. That’s not fat.
Oh Meghan. You had me until the dress size. So what if you weren’t a size 8? What if you were a size 12, 16 or 22? Is there a number at which it is acceptable to publicly attack someone for her weight? There is no threshold where it is fair game to diminish a person because of her size. I don’t want to know what size you are, wish you were, or are pretending to be. It doesn’t matter and your protest is weakened by divulging what should be personal, and more importantly, inconsequential, information.
For years, women have been judged, at least in part, sometimes in whole, by how we look to the eye, instead of how we sound to the ear. When females defend ourselves against these kinds of disparaging remarks by revealing the numbers on our scales, a disservice is done to every person judged by her weight. Women across the career spectrum from Oprah Winfrey to Jessica Simpson should never have to answer for their sizes. Let’s do ourselves a favor and stop engaging in this self-destructive dialogue.
As International Women’s Day approaches on March 8th, it’s time to recognize the struggles and achievements of women’s rights activists around the world. One of the most vibrant women’s rights movements is in Iran, where every day courageous women risk their freedom and safety to fight for their rights. While most use peaceful means to end discriminatory treatment of women in Iranian family law, they face increasing persecution from the Iranian government: Women are routinely arrested, imprisoned, threatened and banned from traveling abroad.
Even the most prominent women’s rights activist in Iran, lawyer and 2003 Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, is not immune to this mistreatment. She has been repeatedly threatened in government-controlled media in recent months and the Defenders of Human Rights Center, that she operates to provide legal assistance to victims of human rights violations, was forcibly shut down by the government last December and her papers and computers seized.
Why is the Iranian government so afraid of its own women citizens calling for equal rights? The government trots out preposterous charges against them such as “acting against national security through propaganda against the state.” How can women walking around a mountainous area north of Tehran to collect petition signatures possibly undermine the state? How could Alieh Eghdamdoust, recently taken into custody and forced to start serving a three-year prison sentence for participating in a peaceful demonstration in June 2006, possibly be a threat to the security of Iran?
As the Iran country specialist for Amnesty International USA I am constantly challenged on how to craft actions and mobilize activist to combat this disproportionate and seemingly irrational repression of non-violent human rights defenders. And like many human rights activists, I am often frustrated and confounded. But I am also always inspired by the unrelenting courage and pluckiness of women activists in Iran. When asked by the judge at her trial why she participated in the demonstration, Alieh Eghdamdoust replied to the judge, “You should participate as well. Why didn’t you defend your daughters and wife’s rights by attending the legal peaceful gathering?”
