New legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress that would make the rights of sexual minorities a foreign policy priority for the United States.

The bill, called the International Human Rights Defense Act, would direct U.S. diplomats to devise a global strategy for preventing and responding to violence against the LGBT community. It would also create a special envoy within the U.S. State Department who would be tasked with coordinating related policies across the U.S. federal government.

“For the United States to hold true to our commitment to defending the human rights of all people around the world, we must stand with the LGBT community in their struggle for recognition and equality everywhere,” Senator Ed Markey, the bill’s lead sponsor, said in a statement.

Currently, having homosexual relations is illegal in 77 countries. In another five countries, simply being identified as a sexual minority is punishable by death.

The issue came into sharp international focus in February, when Uganda made “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by life in prison, enacting a watered-down version of a law first proposed in 2009 despite widespread condemnation by other governments.

“From when the law tabled in 2009 to today, the cases [of people affected] numbers around 100,” Nikki Mawanda, a transgender Uganda LGBT activist, told IPS.

“These cases vary from imprisonment to evictions, death cases … attempted murder, suicide. And right now as I speak there are more than 108 LGBT refugees from Uganda living in Kenya.”

Mawanda spoke during a press call Tuesday sponsored by American Jewish World Service (AJWS), a humanitarian group.

As elsewhere, the new Ugandan law could now be impacting on broader public health. Fear of imprisonment is now reportedly preventing many LGBT people from seeking health services in the country, as anyone providing such services to sexual minorities in Uganda is considered guilty.

“There’s 1.5 million LGBT [people] who are documented to be not accessing retro-viral AIDS treatment,” Mawanda says. “Will they stop going to clinics? Will clinics stop being there?”

Mawanda sought asylum in the United States earlier this year. But he said that doing so is not an option for many others, because procuring a visa often requires family ties and sufficient economic status.

Meanwhile, Washington has taken a hard rhetorical line in response to the Ugandan legislation. But many activists feel there has been little substantive impact.

“The U.S. has taken a comprehensive review of the Uganda-U.S. relationship and aid,” Ruth Messenger, AJWS’s president, said Tuesday. “We support the U.S. government for taking a serious look at this and the results of the review should be released soon by the U.S. Department of State.”

Extreme pressure
Even in countries without repressive laws like Uganda’s, psychological and physical violence against LGBT people continues to take place.

“It might surprise some people to hear about the situation in Thailand, thought of as a friendly haven for gay travellers from all over the world. But society is not accepting of gay and LGBT people,” Sattara ‘Tao’ Hattirat, a lesbian Thai activist, said on Tuesday’s call.

“Despite being in the capital city, from a middle-class family, I was made to feel that my sexuality and identity are wrong, that I did something wrong in a past life to deserve this.”

Hittirat said that many sexual minorities in Thailand experience “extreme pressure” within their families, with many being forced to marry. Such a situation, she said, leads to high rates of depression and suicide.

Thus far, the Thai LGBT community has received little assistance from the government. Hittarat says there have been no anti-discrimination laws passed, and warns that the state has little understanding of the concept of a hate crime.

“There are incidents [of hate crimes], but the situation is not well documented,” she told IPS. “There are cases of rape of lesbians, butch lesbians in particular, and cases when families chain their children in the house … Many cases exist but are not publicly reflected in numbers.”

Meanwhile, the recent government coup in Bangkok has only made the situation worse.

“It’s destroying democratic processes to the core,” Hittarat say, “making it impossible for human rights, including LGBT rights, to move forward at this point.”

U.S. protections
Meanwhile, the United States has recently stepped up action on domesticLGBT rights, as well. Just this week, President Barack Obama announced his intention to sign an executive order ending discrimination against LGBT workers by federal contractors, seen by advocates as the most significant such move ever taken by a president.

“It’s been estimated that one in five people in the labour force work for a federal contractor, so there will be some people in all 50 states that will have some protection against discrimination from this executive order,” Ian Thompson, a legislative representative with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“In over half the country, there are no explicit state-wide protections against LGBT discrimination. That makes an executive order like this all the more important.”

Still, Thompson says, Obama’s executive order does not do away with the need for the U.S. Congress to pass basic civil rights protections for sexual minorities in the United States. Executive orders, after all, can be undone entirely at the whim of a subsequent president.

A 2011 study by the Williams Institute, at the UCLA School of Law, found that one in four LGBT employees in the United States had reported being discriminated against during the previous half decade.

The study found discrimination against transgender people was even higher. Some 78 percent of transgender respondents reported harassment or mistreatment because of their gender identity, while 47 percent said they had been discriminated against in hiring, promotion or job retention.

This discrimination has significant results. Simply in terms of economics, high rates of poverty and unemployment have been documented among the transgender community.

A moment of silence in held in Washington, DC May 6th for the 234 missing Nigerian school girls who were abducted by Boko Haram on Apr. 14. Credit: Senate Democrats/cc by 2.0

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, May 15 2014 (IPS)

Amidst intensifying concern over the fate of more than 200 girls abducted by a radical Islamist group in northern Nigeria, at least 100 representatives of various activist groups Tuesday pressed the U.S. Senate to approve legislation designed to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls and discourage child marriages around the world.

Introduced by a bipartisan group of senators last week, the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA) would use existing foreign aid to achieve the bill’s major aims and mandate greater coordination of existing U.S. government programmes that address gender-based violence.A 10 percent reduction in child marriages could lead to a 70 percent reduction in infant mortality, according to the activist group Girls Not Brides.

“If passed, it would mean there would be enduring legislation and policy in place by the U.S. government towards violence against women that would not be based on the politics of any particular administration,” Jacqueline Hart, vice president for strategic learning, research, and evaluation at American Jewish World Service (AJWS), told IPS.

AJWS, an international development and human rights group, helped organise the activist lobbying.

IVAWA is no stranger on the Hill; its previous version was shelved as a result of right-wing Republican concerns that it could be used to support abortions and other women’s reproductive rights. The latest version was introduced in the House of Representatives late last year, where it was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Gender-based violence is one of the world’s most prevalent human rights abuses, and has one of the greatest degrees of impunity surrounding it, according to the activist groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

At least one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to U.N. Women.

“This Act makes ending violence against women and girls a top diplomatic priority,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said in a press statement.

“The world has just seen an appalling example of women and girls being treated as property and political bargaining chips in Nigeria, where the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 school girls and is threatening to sell them into slavery and forced marriages.

“Sadly, this is not a viewpoint limited to terrorist leaders: the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) says one in nine girls around the world is married before the age of 15, a harmful practice that deprives girls of their dignity and often their education, increases their health risks, and perpetuates poverty.”

Child brides in rural Senegal at work. Marriage before the age of 18 is a generally common practice in Senegal, with 16 percent of young women getting married and give birth before reaching 15. Credit: Issa Sikiti da Silva/IPS

Indeed, in addition to supporting programmes designed to support national legislation criminalising violence and abuse of girls and women, to provide training to police, prosecutors, and judges to handle such cases, and expand health facilities for women and girls, the bill would support projects aimed at offering girls and women more choices in life, particularly in education and economic opportunity, particularly in countries where early marriage is commonly practiced.

About 14 million girls are married before the age of 18 every year, according to Girls Not Brides. The largest proportion of early marriages occurs in Africa’s Sahel region.

In Niger, some 75 percent of girls are married early, followed by the Central African Republic and Chad. Early marriages occur in every region of the world, with the largest number in India.

According to UNIFEM, 64 million girls are child brides worldwide.

Early marriages inflict abuse on girls and women in many ways, from sexual violence to poor health.

They also increase the chance of physical or sexual abuse in a relationship. In Ethiopia, 81 percent of child brides describe their first physical experience as forced.

The issue is also tied to development. A 10 percent reduction in child marriages could lead to a 70 percent reduction in infant mortality, according to the activist group Girls Not Brides.

The lobbying day on Capitol Hill followed a policy summit hosted Monday by AJWS that featured new research on early marriage undertaken by Nirantar, an Indian feminist resource group.

The research, not yet formally published, focuses less on the appropriate age for marriage than on the role played by the institution of marriage in India’s social structure.

“When we talk about early marriage, it is always the early part we talk about, but what about the marriage part?” asked Archana Dwivedi, deputy director of Nirantar. “What is magic about the age 18?

“We often used child marriage as synonymous for forced marriage, but that is not the case,” she told IPS. “All marriages under 18 are not forced, and all marriages above 18 are not chosen. Imagine a gay boy married to a girl or a lesbian girl married to a man? It can be equally, if not more traumatic, because marriage is also license to have sex.”

Focusing on the age of 18 also diverts attention from girls over 18 who are still suffering the consequences of marrying young, she said. Although often overlooked, these consequences extend beyond the physical health of the women.

“There is too much focus on maternal health, which reinforces the patriarchal thinking that women are there to reproduce healthy children….What about her mental health, how she feels? After marriage, all the opportunities in her life are a given…there is nothing left in life to dream of or desire.”

Dwivedi argued that organisations working to end child marriages need to apply different indicators in assessing the effectiveness of their work.

While many organisations report how many early marriages they helped prevent or delay, they often fail to address the necessity of changing social and cultural attitudes about early marriage, as well as the institution itself.

Acceptance of conventional explanations for early marriage, such as blaming it on poverty, is unlikely to change long-prevalent attitudes.

Focusing on expectations surrounding marriage itself, on the other hand, will more likely lead to a broader range of choices for girls and women and thus empower them.

“Even in urban upper class families, a parent will spend half the family’s money on the education of the son and half on the marriage of the daughter,” she said.

“The attitude is that parents think marriage is the only viable solution for girls…Parents are working with the best intentions to help get their child settled, not doing it to ruin their lives, but to stabilise them. But there’s something wrong with our idea of stability.”

Women protest insecurity and living conditions at a tent camp in central Port-au-Prince, January 2011. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. Congress is being urged to pass “urgent” legislation that would make issues of violence against women and girls a key focus in all U.S. diplomatic efforts.

The last such proposal, in 2010, was voted down on conservative concerns. But on Thursday lawmakers, activists and development workers kicked off a new campaign to push through pending legislation that would require diplomats to address issues related to violence against women when dealing with their counterparts around the world, in addition to altering how the United States allocates its development funding."If we say it is important for governments to make certain changes before they can receive full funding, our colleague countries will adopt similar polices.” -- Ruth Messinger

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the bill, the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA), in the U.S. House of Representatives late last month. The legislation would place the United States in a global leadership position on violence against women, for the first time bringing together U.S. efforts on the issue at a global level.

“We strongly believe that this law would send a signal … that ending violence against women is a permanent goal for the world,” Wangechi Wachira, executive director of the Centre for Rights Education and Awareness in Nairobi, told journalists Thursday.

“This act will help organisations that do most of this work at the community level. It also means that Americans will be … focusing on issues very dear to us – issues of our mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, all around the world.”

Supporters say the law’s passage would be felt by grassroots groups such as Wachira’s, as well as in the hallways of governments in both donor countries and developing nations.

“In many of the countries where we work, there is no legislation of any sort like this, despite immense problems of violence against women and no place for victims of any kind to bring their cases forward,” Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service (AJWS), an international development and rights group, told IPS.

“The United States is the largest donor compared to other Western nations in terms of the funding it gives, so that makes it particularly important for the U.S. to target aid to sensitive issues. If we say it is important for governments to make certain changes before they can receive full funding, our colleague countries will adopt similar polices.”

Educate, embolden

Around the world, rates of violence against women and girls remain astoundingly high. Statistically, one in three women will be abused, beaten or raped during her lifetime, while up to 70 percent of women in some countries are thought to experience some form of abuse.

For many, the experience begins very young. Despite child marriage being widely outlawed, some 10 million girls are still estimated to enter into early or forced marriage each year.

Messinger suggests that, even as a mere proposal, IVAWA will be able to embolden some grassroots groups working on women’s rights issues.

“In many of these places there may a law on the books that suggests equality for women and specifically addresses such violence, but in too many cases that law isn’t known about or isn’t enforced,” she says.

“In many cases, grassroots activists don’t know enough or don’t have the resources to move the issue forward … knowing that a bill like this is before the U.S. Congress and that it may influence how the United States gives out its funding will make a difference for activists on the ground in getting their government to take more steps to address the problems.”

The new discussion around IVAWA comes as the administration of President Barack Obama has substantially stepped up its own institutional commitments to women’s global security.

Last year, the federal government released the United States’ first ever national strategy on preventing global gender-based violence, aimed at coordinating U.S. action on the issue. This year the president created a new department, the ambassador-led Office of Global Women’s Issues, which IVAWA would now make permanent.

Indeed, IVAWA is seen as a central requirement in terms of actually implementing many of the goals set out in the national strategy.

“President Obama has shown extraordinary leadership on this issue, but we can do more – we need to institutionalise a comprehensive approach,” Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House of Representatives and a primary author of the IVAWA proposal, told journalists Thursday.

“This act would require the implementation of a comprehensive U.S. strategy to prevent and respond to violence internationally, including rule-of-law reforms, civil and criminal protections, new educational opportunities, and the promotion of economic opportunities for women.”

Health + women

IVAWA was originally proposed in 2007 but has since failed repeatedly to receive the necessary approval, due exclusively to concerns on the part of conservative lawmakers. Likewise, passage of similar domestic legislation passed last year only by a slim margin, causing contentious rifts among Republicans.

Last month, Schakowsky told the media that Republicans “are hesitant about seeing … health and women in the same sentence – they’re concerned that abortion is somehow involved, which it is not.”

Yet Schakowsky and other supporters are more optimistic about the ability of the new proposal – which has been tweaked around Republican concerns – to draw broad bipartisan support. For one, the IVAWA proposal wouldn’t require any additional federal funding.

In addition, a spate of high-profile stories, including the series of atrocious rape cases in India, has brought unique focus to the issue of women’s abuse over the past year. Such accounts have mobilised an unusual level of public outrage across the globe, including here in the United States.

Schakowsky is also urging conservatives to look at the issue of violence against women not just from a humanitarian perspective but also as an important security concern, including for the United States.

“The most dangerous places to be a woman are also some of the most unstable,” she said Thursday. “Securing women’s rights strengthens entire communities and takes a critical step towards promoting global stability.”

Supporters are now stepping up pressure on the U.S. Senate to draft companion legislation, which they hope will be voted upon by both houses after the New Year.

Emergency relief supplies flown into the airport are trucked to a nearby warehouse at Tacloban Task Force Headquarters and sorted on Nov. 17, 2013. Credit: Carol Han, OFDA

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

Even as Washington has mounted a strikingly robust response to the humanitarian crisis in the Philippines, the ongoing effort is highlighting important gaps in the United States’ emergency relief capability – gaps that could start to be addressed through legislative reforms currently under debate in the U.S. Congress.

Shortly after the Nov. 8 landfall of a massive typhoon in the central Philippines, the U.S. government announced that it would be providing an initial 20 million dollars in humanitarian assistance to survivors. A U.S. military aircraft carrier and fleet of supply ships have also moved into the area, offering significant technical capacity for rescuers and humanitarian groups.“The shipping lobby remains staunchly opposed, and they bear a lot of the responsibility for the failure of the movement on reform.” -- Eric Munoz

According to USAID, the government’s main foreign aid arm, half of that 20 million dollars would go to getting food to communities devastated by Typhoon Haiyan (or Yolanda, as it’s known in the Philippines). Yet while an initial 55 metric tonnes of food was to be immediately flown in from the United States, the bulk of this shipment – an additional 1,020 tonnes of rice – isn’t slated to arrive by boat in the Philippines until the first week of December, according to a USAID factsheet.

That’s despite the fact that this rice had been prepositioned in Sri Lanka, specifically to respond to emergencies of this type in Asia. The lag in delivery is the result of a peculiarity in U.S. law, requiring that foreign food aid be grown primarily in the United States and transported primarily on U.S.-flagged ships.

“What’s happening in the Philippines should be a touchstone for members of Congress and the response that USAID has provided, in thinking about what is necessary in addressing natural disasters,” Eric Munoz, a senior policy advisor with Oxfam America, a humanitarian group, told IPS.

“Congress runs the risk of ignoring the fact that good humanitarian response requires different tools than Congress has wanted to give USAID to run operations. Haiyan demonstrates the tools that USAID and aid groups need to run these operations, and this now needs to be taken care of [legislatively].”

For years, advocates have been pushing for changes that would allow for greater flexibility in responding to humanitarian crises by providing cash – which can be provided almost immediately and used for local procurement of food and other supplies – rather than “in kind” provisions, which have to be physically lugged to crisis zones.

Such changes have been stymied by special interests, however, despite government auditors (including here and here) having repeatedly warned that the process is highly inefficient, impacting most negatively on the communities U.S. aid is trying to help.

USAID officials, too, have recognised the need for greater flexibility. According to a USAID fact sheet released Saturday, U.S. funding is now helping the World Food Programme (WFP) to locally procure an additional 10,000 tonnes of rice.

“Of the 10 million dollars the U.S. has provided [for food aid], more than 75 percent was for local and regional procurement,” Munoz says. “This clearly demonstrates that USAID thinks it sensible that the vast majority of current aid go towards local procurement.”

Indeed, USAID has been able to tap a contingency fund to make much of this cash available. Yet doing so will now make a significant dent in that fund for the rest of the fiscal year, which began only last month.

“Because USAID is using this money now to buy locally, it will have far less money to use in Syria,” Timi Gerson, advocacy director at American Jewish World Service (AJWS), a development group, told IPS.

“A similar dynamic took place when the Syria conflict began and USAID was suddenly forced to choose between using these funds for Syria or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as you couldn’t physically truck food supplies into either country. Once again, the situation in the Philippines is putting in stark relief why reform of this system is necessary.”

Political sea change

After years of mounting criticism of the U.S. system of food aid delivery, this past spring President Barack Obama proposed a full overhaul.

For decades the U.S. Congress has considered food aid policy and funding under multi-year agricultural legislation known as the farm bill. The president’s proposal would have changed this (among multiple other reforms), forcing Congress to consider food aid instead as a foreign aid issue and thus delinking food aid from domestic agricultural interests.

Although receiving significant bipartisan support, the president’s proposal failed to receive the necessary backing. Nonetheless, important scaled-back changes have lived on in a Senate version of the farm bill, and many are optimistic these will now make it into law. (Differences between the Senate and House versions of the farm bill are currently being hammered out in a special committee.)

The Senate bill would make permanent a pilot project started in 2008, funding a tool to facilitate local purchasing at around 350 million dollars. It would also step up USAID’s ability to engage in local procurement by an additional 20 percent.

AJWS’s Gerson says these smaller-bore reforms are important “political statements”.

“Politically, we’ve really seen a sea change,” she says. “In 2008, this issue was so controversial that we couldn’t even get it to a vote. This time we lost by just 10 votes. Policy will take a little while to catch up, but we see these changes now as first steps.”

An important part of the changed political landscape has to do with the groups – particularly the implementing NGOs, the farming and shipping lobbies – that had long opposed tweaks to U.S. food aid policy. Gerson says this “iron triangle has been irrevocably broken”.

Several of the largest global humanitarian NGOs, including CARE and Save the Children, have now decided to support reforms. So too have some of the most prominent voices in the U.S. agriculture sector, including the agribusiness giant Cargill and the National Farmers Union (NFU).

Indeed, these latter two supported President Obama’s ambitious overhaul proposal. “[T]here is, and must continue to be, a clear, continuing role for American agriculture in food aid. However, our modern globalized food system makes the case for greater flexibility in our aid programs,” Roger Johnson, the NFU’s president, wrote in May.

As yet, however, the shipping groups continue to support requirements that half of U.S. food aid be transported on U.S.-flagged ships.

“The shipping lobby remains staunchly opposed,” Oxfam America’s Munoz says, “and they bear a lot of the responsibility for the failure of the movement on reform.”