A girl from the Nat community performing – Credit: Department for Social Justice

By Mariya Salim
NEW DELHI, India, Jul 30 2021 (IPS)

Branded as being born ‘criminal’ 150 years ago under British colonial rule, De-Notified Tribes (DNTs) continue to bear the brunt of the various laws that stigmatised them since 1871.

Dakxin Chhara, the award-winning filmmaker and DNT activist, shared how the DNT community in India continues living an abysmal existence because of a centuries-old criminality stigma. Chhara calls his community an “invisible population” owing to their absence from government records, welfare schemes and a complete lack of political will to address their marginalisation.

“Even within a village in India, one can see the clear demarcation of localities based on caste, religion etc. One of the most marginalised, Dalits (former untouchables) also have an area where they stay, but for DNTs, there is no space within this structure,” Chhara said in an exclusive interview with IPS. “They are not considered worthy of being part of the village, and most end up living in jungles, moving from one place to another, isolated and stigmatised.”

Filmmaker and activist Dakxin Chhara. Credit: Handout

In 1871, nearly 150 tribes were notified to be criminals by the ‘Criminal Tribes Act’ passed by the British, meaning, just being born into one of these tribes made one a criminal. The absurdity of the rationale behind this discriminatory law, introduced in 1871 in India, a society largely based on caste and caste-based discrimination, can be seen in the British official’s introduction to the bill. He said: “People from time immemorial have been pursuing the caste system defined job-positions: weaving, carpentry and such were hereditary jobs. So, there must have been hereditary criminals also who pursued their forefathers’ profession.”

Academics say the creation of these criminal tribes was a “colonial stereotype”. It was to justify the British to discipline or control a section of the population who did not fit into the colonial power’s moral order they were trying to enforce on rural society. Among the worst victims were communities like the DNTs, who did not have a sedentary lifestyle. This made it more difficult to demand their subservience.

The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, was repealed on August 31, 1952, resulting in the former criminal tribes ‘de-notified’ of this discriminatory tag. However, this was only on paper.

As in most groups, the women from these communities bear many layers of marginalisation. Sakila Khatoon from the north Indian state of Bihar belongs to the Nat community. Married off at a very early age, Sakila pursued her education and worked within the development sector on issues concerning her community. Most women she works with, however, have not had that opportunity, she told IPS.

Women from the Nat community face prejudice and stereotypes because of their involvement in sex work, and those who wish to explore other avenues of livelihood are discouraged and not treated with dignity. Sex workers from the community not only face stigmatisation but also are targets of police excesses. Khatoon shared how children of these women are often discouraged from pursuing higher education and are recipients of undignified comments from people who know that their parents are sex workers.

“Encouraging and supporting women from our communities to pursue higher education is the key to their upliftment,” Khatoon says.

Vijay (name changed) from the ‘Pardhi’ community in the state of Madhya Pradesh shared how harassment by police led to many people belonging to his community commit suicide and how the authorities continue to ostracise them. Youth are arbitrarily arrested on mere suspicion because they are seen as habitual offenders.

Over the years, there haven’t been any genuine attempts to address the plight of the DNT communities, and commissions aimed at improving their condition have failed.

Shiney Vashisht, a PhD research scholar at the Jamia Milia Islamia in New Delhi, who worked as a researcher at the National Commission for Denotified, Nomadic and Semi Nomadic tribes, confirms this.

“The National Commissions established and re-established over the years, have done nothing close to substantial for the DNTs except for half-heartedly recommending welfare steps, that are a mere compilation of suggestions from previous commission reports, based on population projections of decades-old data,” Vashisht says.

Based on her engagement with leaders from the community and field research, she argues that these communities deserve a designated commission, having a constitutional status on the lines of National Commissions for Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

The commission should generate a database from a national survey of DNTs. The inquiries should have a strong mandate to recommend DNT specific welfare schemes.

Chhara adds that one of the demands of the DNT community is separate reservations. He gives the example of the state of Maharashtra, where within the OBC quota, there is a separate reservation for DNTs and says that a model similar to this should be applicable throughout the country.

Chhara remembers how as children, his sister eventually gave up going to school after the humiliation of being falsely called a thief in front of the entire class and teacher when a few marble balls went missing.

Years later, little has changed. Chhara had to remove his children from their school after the principal told him that because the school’s trustees belonged to the upper caste, the school had clear instructions of not admitting any children from communities that Chhara came from.

“It is not hard to guess that when something like this can happen to a man like me who has won national and international awards, what would the fate and plight of others belonging to our communities be.”

• Mariya Salim is a fellow of IPS UN Bureau

Two Mexican teenage girls at their school. Investing in education for teenage girls in Latin America is regarded as the way forward for them to become future drivers of sustainable develpment in their societies. Credit: UNFPA LAC

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jul 11 2016 (IPS)

Latin America’s teenage girls are a crucial force for change and for promoting sustainable development, if the region invests in their rights and the correction of unequal opportunities, according to Luiza Carvalho, the regional head of UN Women.

“An empowered adolescent will know her rights and will stand up for them; she has tools for success and is a driving froce for positive change in her community,” Carvalho told IPS in an interview from the regional headquarters of UN Women in Panama City.

Adolescent girls and boys will have a leading role in their societies when the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development has been completed, she said. One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is gender equality. Investing in today’s girls will have “a great transformative impact in future,” she said. “Investing in education and protection against violence are important tools for fulfilling the potential of teenage girls and young women,as wellas for promoting gender equality” -- Luiza Carvalho.

The world today has a higher proportion of its population aged between 10 and 24 years old than ever before, with 1.8 billion young people out of a  total population of 7.3 billion. Roughly 20 percent of this age group live in LatinAmerica and the Caribbean, Carvalho said.

According to data given to IPS by the regional office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 57million of the region’s 634 million people are girls aged between 10 and 19, living mainly in cities.

The theme for this year’s World Population Day, celebrated July 11, is “Investing in Teenage Girls”, on the premise that transforming their present situation to guarantee their right to equality will not only eliminate barriers to their individual potential but will also be decisive for the sustainable development of their countries.

Women Deliver, an international organisation, has calculated the benefits of this investment in financial terms. For every additional 10 percent of girls in school, national GDP rises by an average of three percent; for every extra year of primary schooling a girl has completed, her expected salary as an adult grows by between 10 and 20 percent.

This is fundamental because, as Carvalho pointed out, “lack of economic empowerment, together with generalised gender discrimination and the reinforcemet of traditional stereotypes, negatively affects the capability of women in Latin America and the Caribbean to participate on an equal footing in all aspects of public and private life.”

Luiza Carvalho, regional director of UN Women for Latin America and the Caribbean. Credit: UN Women LAC

That is why “investing in education and protection against violence are important tools for fulfilling the potential of teenage girls and young women,as well as for promoting gender equality,” she said.

Teenage women, she said, “are an especially vulnerable group who face special social, economic and political barriers.” Their empowerment in the region may come up against difficulties such as unwanted pregnancy, forced early marriage or union, gender violence and limited access to education and reproductive health services.”

As an example of these obstacles, the regional director of UN Women said that a Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) study of women aged 15-49 years in 12 countries of the region “reported that for a substantial proportion of these women, their first sexual encounter had been unwanted or coerced.”

Carvalho stressed that “early marriage or union imposed on girls is a major concern in the region, and it significantly affects the exercise of adolescent girls’ rights developing their full potential.”

“It is a form of violence that denies them their childhood, interrupts their education, limits their social development, curtails their opportunities, exposes them to the risk of premature pregnancy at too young an age, or unwanted pregnancy and its possible complications, and increases their risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV (human immuno-deficiency virus),” she said.

It also increases the girls’ exposure to “becoming victims of violence and abuse,” Carvalho said.

In Carvalho’s view it is very positive that all the countries inthe region have established minimum ages for marriage in their laws, but on the other hand, the laws fix different minimum ages for boys and for girls, and in certain cases such as pregnancy or motherhood, girls may legally marry before they reach the minimum age.

In Latin America, far from diminishing, teenage pregnancies have increased in recent years, due to cultural acceptance of early sexual initiation. As a result, the region ranks second in the world for adolescent birth rates, with an average of 76 live births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 years, second only to sub-Saharan Africa.

Furthermore, 30 percent of Latin American teenage girls do not have access to the contraceptive care services they need, according to UNFPA. Sexual and reproductive health face especially high barriers in this region because of patriarchal,culture, the weight of conservative sectors and the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

In Latin America, indigenous teenage girls, together with their rural counterparts, are the group most discriminated against in terms of opportunities and access to education. Credit: Rajesh Krishnan/UN Women

In contrast, the region has a good record on education. Over 90 percent of its countries have policies to promote equal access by teenagers to education. Ninety percent of teenage girls have finished their primary school education, although only 78 percent go on to secondary school, according to UNFPA.

The greatest educational access barriers are faced by rural and indigenous teenage girls, who have difficulties for physical access to some education centres. In the case of indigenous and Afro-descendant girls, this is added to inappropriate curricula or the absence of educational materials in their native languages (mother tongues). 

Carvalho highlighted as a positive element that education laws, especially those that have been reformed recently, “have begun to recognise the importance of establishing legal provisions that promote and disseminate human rights, peaceful coexistence and sex education.”

However, she regretted that “direct connections with prevention of violence against women and girls are still incipient.”

In her view, the school curriculum plays an essential role. Including contents and materials “related to human rights and the rights of women and girls, non-violent conflict resolution, co-responsibility and basic education about sexual and reproductive health,” will potentiate more non-violent societies, inside and outside of the classroom, she said.

Carvalho quoted a 2015 study carried out in 13 Latin American countries by UN Women and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which concluded that education systems are failing to prevent violence against girls.

“This is something that must be improved, because it is in the first few years of early childhood that egalitarian role modelling between girls and boys can occur and lay the foundations of the prevention of violence, discrimination, and inequality in all its forms,” she emphasised.

Carvalho said changes should start with something as simple as it is frequently forgotten: “Girls, teenagers and women are rights-holders and entitled to their rights.”

If girls are given “equal access to education, health care, sexual and reproductive education, decent jobs, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes, sustainable economies would be promoted and societies, and humanity as a whole, would benefit,” she concluded. 

Edited by Verónica Firme. Translated by Valerie Dee.

By Vani S. Kulkarni and Raghav Gaiha
PHILADELPHIA AND BOSTON, Nov 10 2015 (IPS)

Few dispute that women’s autonomy and betterment of their lives are moral imperatives. But whether these are also key to economic development is contested.

In an admirably cogent article, Esther Duflo (2013) evaluates a bi-directional relationship between women’s empowerment and development. Although somewhat overemphatic about the role that development alone can play in driving down gender inequality, she highlights that affirmative action has an important role, too. Amartya Sen, in several influential writings, however, has forcefully argued that continuing discrimination against women can hinder development. We are inclined to this view as “masculinity” is unrelated to development.

Dominance and control over women are set in male attributes and behaviour (“masculinity”), regarded as a shared social ideal. Masculinity is characterised by two factors — namely, “relationship control” as a behavioural attribute and “attitudes towards gender equality” as an underlying value. Behavioural changes are, however, slower than changes in male attitudes (UNFPA, 2014).

Women’s empowerment is defined “as improving the ability of women to access the constituents of development—in particular health, education, earning opportunities, rights, and political participation” (Duflo, 2012).

Gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls are enshrined in SDG 5. This is an ambitious goal. The litany of sub-goals is impressive but daunting. These include ending of all forms of discrimination against all women and girls; elimination of all forms of violence against them in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual exploitation; ensuring their full participation in opportunities for leadership in political, economic and social spheres; universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights; and equal rights to all economic resources including land.

Duflo argues that gender inequality is often greater among the poor, both within and across countries. Moreover, within countries, gaps between boys and girls persist in poorer and more isolated communities. But economic growth, by reducing poverty and expanding livelihood opportunities, has the potential for reducing gender inequality.

Are girls treated differently than boys? Yes, but only during crises. In India, for example, the excessive mortality rate of girls, relative to boys, spikes during droughts. So, in extreme circumstances, improved access to health services would disproportionately help girls, even if parents do not change their behaviour toward them. This flies in the face of mounting evidence of female foeticide, infanticide and pervasive neglect of girls in education, and wage disparities in some of the more affluent northern states in India. In fact, the selective abortion of female foetuses, usually after a first born girl, has increased over the past few decades, and has contributed to a widening imbalance in the child sex ratio. Cultural taboos prevent women from reporting, for example, gynaecological disorders unless they become acute. So we are far less sanguine about improved access to health services as a by-product of growth –a somewhat dubious proposition in itself – benefiting girls and women disproportionately.

At all level of incomes, women do the majority of housework and care and, correspondingly, spend less time in market work. Constrained in these ways, they are more likely to be engaged in informal but hardly remunerative home-based enterprises. So if economic development frees their time, they are more likely to switch to more productive activities. But this overlooks the imperfections of credit markets that deny them credit for being not creditworthy. Besides, social norms restrict their mobility.

Are labour market outcomes likely to be more favourable? A recent World Bank study (2015) is far from reassuring. It reports that in the workplace, females earn between 20 per cent and 80 per cent lower average wages than do males, depending on the country. Evidence from India’s Labour Bureau is more definitive. The data show that there has been little progress in terms of parity of salaries for men and women for equivalent work. Even more alarming is the fact that, in some spheres of activity in rural areas, the divide has widened. As of 2013, the discrimination in wages paid to women tends to be higher in physically intensive activities (such as ploughing and well-digging), but lower in the case of work such as sowing and harvesting.

So development alone will not accomplish much –indeed, much less than conjectured by Duflo – in empowering women. She doesn’t of course overlook the case for affirmative action to ensure greater participation of women in the political, economic and social spheres. But she remains sceptical of women’s empowerment contributing substantially to development as women are not always the best decision-makers.

Let us consider two examples from her research in which women made a positive contribution to development.

In an earlier but highly influential study (with Chattopadhyay) of Panchayats (village councils) in two Indian states, headed by women elected through quotas, it is demonstrated that these Panchayats invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the expressed development priorities of women. In West Bengal, for example, where women complained more often than men about water and roads, the Panchayats invested more in water and roads. In Rajasthan, where women complained more often about drinking water but less about roads, the councils invested more in water and less in roads. Whether such choices would have been made in the absence of quotas for women heads of Panchayats is highly unlikely. Besides, there may be dynamic gains through changes in male attitudes towards women as decision-makers. Questions, however, remain about complaints by women as a preference revelation mechanism in a rural setting, as also about women Panchayat heads’ autonomy or ability to ignore or circumvent investment allocation priorities handed down from “above”.

In a test of whether income in the hands of women of a household has a different impact on intra-household allocation than income in the hands of the men, she found that pensions received by women in South Africa translated into better nutrition for girls. In contrast, no such effect was found when the pension was received by a man and no corresponding effects were obtained for boys.

Duflo is, however, far from convinced that women generally make the best decisions for development and thus there is a real risk of exaggerating their contribution. The fact that returns on loans given to women to run small enterprises are lower (or even zero) relative to those run by men is not conclusive evidence of women entrepreneurs’ inefficiency. This is a muddled inference for two reasons: as noted by her, women are often compelled to engage in home-based but hardly remunerative enterprises by their family responsibilities and binding time constraint. Relaxation of not just this but other constraints enhances their returns substantially.

A recent World Bank study (2015), as a synthesis of empirical evidence, is illuminating.

Women running subsistence-level firms are prone to external pressures to divest some of the cash from loans or grants to relatives or household expenses.

Evidence shows that women’s demand for saving accounts is high. A review of nine randomized field experiments in countries covering different regions (including Kenya, Philippines, Nepal and Guatemala) shows that savings are a promising way to improve rural women’s productivity. In Western Kenya, for example, women with access to savings accounts invested 45 percent more in their businesses and were less prone to sell business assets during health emergencies.

Capital in-kind (e.g. a physical asset such as livestock) works better than in cash to nudge women to keep the money in the business rather than to divert it for household use or pass it on to relatives.

Many of women’s additional constraints can be overcome by simple, inexpensive adjustments in programme/intervention design.

A two-month grace period versus immediate repayment requirements for poor urban women borrowers in Kolkata, India, significantly raised long-run (three-year) business profits by encouraging risk taking.

Women enjoy greater autonomy if they are able to use mobile money services to conduct financial transactions in private, receive reminders to save and obtain information on prices in real time without having to travel long distances.

Panel household survey data for Bangladesh, covering a twenty-year period, show a beneficial effect, greater for females than for males, of 20-year cumulative microcredit borrowing on household per capita income and the reduction of extreme poverty.

Business skills matter. A vocational training programme in slums in New Delhi imparting skills in tailoring enhanced employment, self- employment and earnings of women but attrition rate was high due to lack of child care support and distance.

In conclusion, the evidence supports the view that economic development and women’s empowerment reinforce each other. If women’s empowerment is a by-product of development, it is just that. That women’s empowerment is a major driver of development is contested but highly plausible.

(End)

Excerpt:

Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean (right) has been working with the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI), using Haitian craftsmanship in areas such as embroidery and beadwork in her collections. Credit: ITC Ethical Fashion Initiative 5

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Jun 4 2015 (IPS)

“Work is dignity,” says Simone Cipriani. “People want employment, not charity.”

With that in mind, Italian-born Cipriani founded a programme in 2009 called the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI) that links some of the world’s top fashion talents to marginalised artisans – mostly women – in East and West Africa, Haiti and the West Bank.

Now a flagship programme of the International Trade Centre, a joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Geneva-based EFI works with leading designers such as Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood to facilitate the development and production of “high-quality, ethical fashion items” from artisans living in low-income rural and urban areas.

The EFI says its aim is also to “enable Africa’s rising generation of fashion talent to forge environmentally sound, sustainable and fulfilling creative collaborations with local artisans.” Under its slogan “not charity, just work”, the Initiative advocates for a fairer global fashion industry.“We work with women who sometimes face discrimination in their communities, but by having a job, their position in society improves. They gain independence and respect, and in many situations they become the only breadwinner in their families” – Simone Cipriani, Ethical Fashion Initiative

This year, for the first time, the EFI is collaborating with the most important international trade fair for men’s fashion, Pitti Immagine Uomo, to host designers who represent four African countries.

Taking place June 16 to 19 in Florence, Italy, the fair will present a special edition of its Guest Nation Project, in which a particular area is designated for the “rising stars” of fashion from various countries, according to Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of Pitti.

Napoleone said that the African designers in this year’s Guest Nation give priority to manufacturing in their home countries, helping to reduce poverty, and that they are already known on the international market.

The stylists will put on a runway show, highlighting their men’s collections, in a special event titled ‘Constellation Africa’. The brands – Dent de Man, MaXhosa by Laduma, Orange Culture and Projecto Mental – have designers who represent Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, Nigeria and Angola, and were selected as part of the African Fashion Designer competition launched by the EFI last December.

“This is where our global society is going: interconnectedness. Global and local dimensions brought together through fashion,” said Cipriani.

Market analysts expect the global value of the apparel retail industry to rise about 20 percent from 2014 levels to reach some 1,500 billion dollars in 2017. With such high volumes, the various sectors of the industry could be an increasing source of employment in many regions, from design to garment-making to sales.

But over the past several years, there has been controversy about the apparent exclusion of fashion designers and models of African descent in high-profile ‘Fashion Weeks’ and other international events

Tansy E. Hoskins, author of a polemical book published last year titled Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, has a whole chapter devoted to the question “Is Fashion Racist?”

She says that several decades after a renowned fashion magazine had its first black model on the cover, “all-white catwalks, all-white advertising campaigns and all-white fashion shoots are still the norm”.

Simone Cipriani, founder of the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI). Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

The Ethical Fashion Initiative is primarily concerned with poverty reduction and ethical treatment of artisans, but Cipriani acknowledges that racism is an issue and that poverty can be linked to ethnicity as well as gender.

Still, the fashion industry does have companies that try to adhere to ethical standards, including diversity, working conditions and environmental sustainability; and 30 international brands have signed on to the EFI project. But not every company is a good fit.

“We try to work almost exclusively with brands that have a clear scheme on responsible business and social engagement, otherwise there’s always the risk of being used and having to clean up after somebody else,” Cipriani told IPS in an interview, during a trip to Paris to meet with designers.

“We’ve had our troubles and have had to work through a long learning curve”, he added. “We also tried to work with big distributors and realised it wasn’t possible for what we do, so here we are.”

Groups such as the EFI and activists like Hoskins say that their major concern is how to make the fashion industry fairer, particularly with decent labour conditions for workers everywhere.

Two years ago in Bangladesh, for instance, more than 1,100 workers died and 2,500 were injured when a factory building collapsed after safety warnings were ignored. The workers made clothing for brands including Benetton, which only this year announced that it would contribute to a compensation fund for the victims.

That agreement followed a campaign in which one million people signed an online petition calling for the company to take proper action.

“What happened in Bangladesh was a horror, and there are many situations in which exactly the same horror can occur,” Cipriani said. “The first thing about responsibility should always be people. Dignified working conditions for people.”

He said that many artisans working in the fashion industry’s supply chain also do not earn enough to live on. “They don’t get the remuneration for their work that allows them to have a dignified life,” he told IPS. “Many of them are paid in such a way that they have to live at the margin.”

In Haiti, which is known for its artistry as well as its poverty, activists say that linking local artisans with international designers can and have made some impact. The Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean has been working with EFI, using Haitian craftsmanship in areas such as embroidery and beadwork in her collections, for example. She also employs textiles made in Africa.

Jean has been an EFI “partner” since 2013 and she sources several elements of her designs through its projects, Cipriani said. The collaboration started with a visit to Burkina Faso – one of the largest producers of cotton in Africa with an important tradition of hand-weaving – where the designer saw the possibilities of “working with these ethically produced textiles”. She incorporated them as a key feature of her women’s and men’s ready-to-wear collections.

Last year, she also launched a new range of bags, produced in Kenya with fabric from Burkina Faso and Mali and vegetable-tanned leather from Kenya, “making each bag a pan-African product,” says the EFI.

In Kenya, British designers McCartney (who declined to be interviewed) and Westwood have placed several orders for fashion items, and the EFI has carried out “Impact Assessment” studies to evaluate compliance with fair labour standards “and the impact the orders had on people and the communities they live in.”

“We work with women who sometimes face discrimination in their communities, but by having a job, their position in society improves,” Cipriani told IPS. “They gain independence and respect, and in many situations they become the only breadwinner in their families.”

The Ethical Fashion Initiative has testimonials from artisans about the improvement in their lives from the income they received through the orders, with several workers detailing their new ability to pay rent and school fees, among other developments.

Hoskins says that these steps are important, but that the fashion industry cannot be fully transformed without massive, collective action. “Ethical fashion has become a catch-all phrase encompassing issues such as environmental toxicity, labour rights, air miles, animal cruelty and product sustainability,” she argues.

“After 20 or so years and despite some innovative initiatives, it holds an ‘exceptionally low market share’ at just over 1 percent of the overall apparel market.”

In an interview, she said that asking whether fashion can ever be ethical is like asking “can capitalism ever be ethical?”

“For me the answer is ‘no’ because it’s based on exploitation, it’s based on competition, and above all it’s based on profit, and that’s what in the fashion industry drives wages down, drives environmental standards down and down and down,” she told IPS.

“There are small companies doing things differently but they’re producing maybe a few thousand units every year. The fashion industry produces billions and billions of units every single year.”

Hoskins also asked the question: “Why is it not the case that all products are ethically made?”

But reform evidently takes time. With the Pitti trade fair in Italy now collaborating with EFI, the “ethical fashion” movement may get a boost. It is also up to consumers to make the right choices, activists say.

“Consumers must demand change. Consumers can’t be too docile,” says Cipriani.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Azzum Atme checkpoint border crossing from the West Bank into Israel, where hundreds of Palestinian labourers cross into Israel each day using Israeli buses. These labourers already face long delays at the checkpoint and if they are banned from Israeli buses their trips will take even longer. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, May 24 2015 (IPS)

A  decision by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to segregate buses in the occupied West Bank has backfired after causing an uproar in Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, and political damage on the international stage.

This came as Israel faces mounting international criticism over its land expropriation and settlement building in the West Bank, and other forms of discrimination levelled against Palestinians.

Israel’s new extreme right-wing government is also being attacked on the domestic front with liberal Israelis, and Israeli NGOs involved in human rights, accusing the government of damaging Israel’s image and values.“The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and the threat of economic sanctions on Israel is a language the Israeli government understands far more than empty threats from the Americans who never followed any criticism of the Israeli government with any action” – Prof Samir Awad, political scientist at Birzeit University

Israeli settlers in the West Bank have been waging a campaign to prohibit Palestinians, particularly labourers who work in Israel, from using their buses in the occupied West Bank for over a year, saying that they represented a security threat, refused to give up their seats for Israelis and expressed sexual interest in Israeli women.

Last week, approval was given for buses to be segregated but after the backlash the plan was quickly scrapped.

However, Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon quickly denied that segregation or racism had anything to do with the issue and that the decision to ban Palestinians from Israeli buses had only been based on “security” needs.

Neither has Ya’alon given up on the plan. He intends to instruct the IDF to come up with a new plan to cover all 13 crossing points from the West Bank into Israel.

This development came simultaneously as European Union foreign policy head Federica Mogherini paid a 24-hour visit May 20-21 to Jerusalem and Ramallah in an effort to push the Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward, stating that Europe wanted to play a more prominent role in the process.

But behind Mogherini’s visit was growing approval within the European Union for more pressure to be exerted on Israel to stop expropriating land from the Palestinians to build more illegal Israeli settlements and enlarge current ones.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry was on the defensive following its perception of bias from the European Union.

“The Israeli government will not be pressured by the European Union into making any concessions with the Palestinians in regards to the peace process,” said a spokesman from Israel’s Foreign Ministry – who insisted on remaining anonymous due to “ongoing problems at the ministry”.

“If the EU exerts one-sided pressure on Israel, without putting any pressure on the Palestinians, the situation will backfire because it will allow the Palestinians to avoid direct negotiations with us at the negotiating table,” the spokesman told IPS.

“Any future peace negotiations will have to involve face to face talks between the Palestinians and us. We will accept nothing less.”

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, quoting a mediaeval biblical scholar, instructed all Israeli diplomats not to apologise for Israel’s occupation, stating that “all of the land (meaning East Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories) belonged to Israel.

As Israel finds itself painted into a corner politically, Palestinian and Israeli analysts have been debating whether there would be any European pressure on Israel and whether that pressure would have any effect.

Political scientist Prof Samir Awad from Birzeit University, near Ramallah, believes that the European Union will be able to successfully pressure the Israeli government, despite its extremism.

“The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and the threat of economic sanctions on Israel is a language the Israeli government understands far more than empty threats from the Americans who never followed any criticism of the Israeli government with any action,” Awad told IPS.

“EU pressure on Israel will also be buoyed by the fact that a number of EU countries have officially recognised a Palestinian state while others have recognised a state in principle and are critical of Israel’s continued occupation and land expropriation in the West Bank,” added Awad.

However, political analyst Benedetta Berti, a research fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, is not convinced that the European Union will succeed in pushing Israel to any negotiating table.

“If we look at their record so far there has been a lot of rhetoric but not much actual action. So far, 16 out of the 28 EU ministers have told Mogherini to go ahead with labelling settlement goods exported to Europe,” Berti told IPS.

“It hasn’t happened yet as they have to get 20 of the 28 EU ministers on board for that and due to the divisions in the EU over Israel I’m not sure that it will happen in the near future,” explained Berti.

Meanwhile, an Israeli rights group has accused the Israeli authorities of being indifferent to attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers and security forces.

“Most cases of violent crimes against Palestinians not only go unpunished – but often are completely ignored by the authorities. Even when criminal investigations against soldiers accused of such offences are opened, they almost always fail,” said Yesh Din, a volunteer organisation working to defend the human rights of Palestinian civilians under Israeli occupation.

The groups said that approximately 94 percent of criminal investigations launched by the IDF against soldiers suspected of criminal violent activity against Palestinians, and their property, are closed without any indictments. In the rare cases that indictments are served, conviction leads to very light sentencing.

“Moreover, Palestinians who attempt to file complaints about crimes committed against them face staggering obstacles in their way. The complete absence of military police stations open to the Palestinian public in the West Bank, for example, makes it literally impossible for Palestinians to file complaints directly with the military police,” stated Yesh Din.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Washington DC, the evening of April 29. 2015. Activists and supporters affiliated with the #DCFerguson movement gathered in Chinatown for a march in solidarity with the Baltimore protests of the cop killing of African-American youth Freddie Gray. The DC event involved over a thousand marchers by the time it wound up in front of the White House. Credit: Stephen Melkisethian/cc by 2.0

By Kitty Stapp
UNITED NATIONS, May 6 2015 (IPS)

Since being roundly chastised last fall by the U.N. Committee Against Torture for excessive use of force by its law enforcement agencies, the United States hasn’t exactly managed to repair its international reputation.

Fatal beatings and shootings of African American and Latino citizens, mainly men, by the police have continued seemingly unabated, with the latest being the widely publicised case of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland. Gray, 25, died Apr. 19 of spinal cord injuries in what has been ruled a homicide after being arrested for allegedly carrying an illegal pocket knife. Six officers have since been charged in his murder."As the U.S. claims a human rights mantle and criticises others for racism, it becomes the world’s greatest hypocrite." -- Michael Ratner

The wave of cases – many caught on camera and shared via social media – have sparked a nationwide protest campaign grouped under the hashtag #blacklivesmatter.

On Nov. 28, a year after the Committee’s damning report, the U.S. must provide information on what it has done to follow up on its recommendations, which included prompt investigation and prosecution of police brutality cases and providing effective remedies and rehabilitation to the victims.

“The best way to begin to bring this racism and particular police murders to an end is by what we are seeing today: massive and militant demonstrations everywhere and shutting cities down,” Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS. “We are in a special moment that rarely occurs in this country; people are mobilised and in the streets. That is the key. Our cities cannot be governed without the consent of the governed.

“But of course there are other important elements as well. The platform the U.N. CAT offered for Blacks particularly to speak out was important, very important. It gave Michael Brown’s family an opportunity to be heard around the world as it did others. The conclusions of the committee were powerful and while the United States tried to ignore them, the world would not. The report gives international legitimacy to the protests we are seeing every day.”

Michael Brown was an unarmed Black teenager who was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. A grand jury refused to indict in his Aug. 9, 2014 death.

Brown’s parents testified before the U.N. committee in Geneva last year, and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein cited the case in condemning “institutionalised discrimination in the U.S.”

“The CAT report put pressure on the U.S. to do something and while its response was inadequate, the report’s findings can be seen as the beginning of the end for the belief both in the U.S. and abroad that the U.S. is a just society toward Blacks,” Ratner said.

“As the U.S. claims a human rights mantle and criticises others for racism, it becomes the world’s greatest hypocrite. Yes, the U.S. is the most powerful country and can ignore the U.N., but ultimately by doing so, it will be ignored.”

Ratner cited a previous instance that demonstrates how important the U.N. can be in this regard. In 1951, “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” was submitted to the U.N. by the Civil Rights Congress and detailed the horrendous situation faced by American Blacks.

“It received huge international press. The U.S. realized that it could not call itself a democracy and claim it was better than Communist countries if racism was so embedded in its society. Three years later the Supreme Court ended school desegregation.

“While the report was not the only reason for that change, the point is that the U.N. and particularly the recent CAT committee report has pointed to serious defects in U.S. democracy and human rights. It’s hard after this report, although surely the U.S. will try, to criticise other countries’ human rights and not simply be laughed at.”

Because the U.S. is a state party to the Convention against Torture, it is regularly examined by the CAT committee. Its next report is due in November 2018, after which the date for the next review will be set. In general, these reviews happen every four or five years.

Alba Morales, a researcher for the U.S. Programme at Human Rights Watch, agrees that advocates have been able to use the international attention brought by these reports to strengthen their local work.

“Take the John Burge torture cases in Chicago, for example,” she told IPS. “Burge was a Chicago police officer commander who oversaw the torture hundreds of arrestees in that city. Chicago advocates worked for decades to obtain accountability for those acts of torture by police, and appeared before the U.N. Committee Against Torture in 2006.

“It was only after the U.N. Committee called for accountability in that case that the U.S. government took action, eventually indicting and convicting Burge of obstruction of justice. While this was the result of many years of local advocacy, the spotlight that the U.N. report shone on these cases also contributed to the outcome.”

Morales said that the United Nations can continue to welcome the voices of those directly affected by human rights violations everywhere, including in the U.S.

“The families of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis attended the last meeting of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Their testimony powerfully illustrated the racial discrimination that persists in the U.S. While none of these U.N. committees can enforce any judgements against the U.S. or any other country, having an international platform amplifies the voices of those who are working incredibly hard to improve the human rights situation in the U.S.”

Ratner noted that U.S. racial discrimination, backed by state violence, has a lengthy and deeply rooted history that dates back hundreds of years.

“Ending the police murders and brutal treatment of Black people in the United States is no easy task,” he said. “Many whites, particularly in law enforcement, are racist to the core. It is a racism that has a history since the early days of slavery and it is a racism that continues in many aspects of Black people’s lives.

“Once it was called slavery, then Jim Crow, then slavery by another name, then the new Jim Crow. Yet we all know this unequal and brutal treatment of Black people must end.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Almost exactly two years ago, on the morning of Apr. 24, over 3,600 workers – 80 percent of them young women between the ages of 18 and 20 – refused to enter the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, because there were large ominous cracks in the walls. They were beaten with sticks and forced to enter.

Forty-five minutes later, the building collapsed, leaving 1,137 dead and over 2,500 injured – most of them women.

The Rana Plaza collapse is just one of a long series of workplace incidents around the world in which women have paid a high toll.

It is also one of the stories featured in the UN Women report Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights, launched on Apr. 27.

All too often women fail to enjoy their rights because they are forced to fit into a ‘man’s world’, a world in which these rights are not at the heart of economies.
Coming 20 years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, which drew up an agenda to advance gender equality, Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016 notes that while progress has since been made, “in an era of unprecedented global wealth, millions of women are trapped in low paid, poor quality jobs, denied even basic levels of health care, and water and sanitation.”

At the same time, notes the report, financial globalisation, trade liberalisation, the ongoing privatisation of public services and the ever-expanding role of corporate interests in the development process have shifted power relations in ways that undermine the enjoyment of human rights and the building of sustainable livelihoods.

Against this backdrop, all too often women fail to enjoy their rights because they are forced to fit into a ‘man’s world’, a world in which these rights are not at the heart of economies.

What this means in real terms is that, for example, at global level women are paid on average 24 percent less than men, and for women with children the gaps are even wider. Women are clustered into a limited set of under-valued occupations – such as domestic work – and almost half of them are not entitled to the minimum wage.

Even when women succeed in the workplace, they encounter obstacles not generally faced by their male counterparts. For example, in the European Union, 75 percent of women in management and higher professional positions and 61 percent of women in service sector occupations have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace in their lifetimes.

The report makes the link between economic policy-making and human rights, calling for a far-reaching new policy agenda that can transform economies and make women’s rights a reality by moving forward towards “an economy that truly works for women, for the benefit of all.”

The ultimate aim is to create a virtuous cycle through the generation of decent work and gender-responsive social protection and social services, alongside enabling macroeconomic policies that prioritise investment in human beings and the fulfilment of social objectives.

Today, “our public resources are not flowing in the directions where they are most needed: for example, to provide safe water and sanitation, quality health care, and decent child and elderly care services,” says UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. “Where there are no public services, the deficit is borne by women and girls.”

According to Mlambo-Ngcuka, “this is a care penalty that unfairly punishes women for stepping in when the State does not provide resources and it affects billions of women the world over. We need policies that make it possible for both women and men to care for their loved ones without having to forego their own economic security and independence,” she added.

The report agrees that paid work can be a foundation for substantive equality for women, but only when it is compatible with women’s and men’s shared responsibility for unpaid care work; when it gives women enough time for leisure and learning; when it provides earnings that are sufficient to maintain an adequate standard of living; and when women are treated with respect and dignity at work.

Yet, this type of employment remains scarce, and economic policies in all regions are struggling to generate enough decent jobs for those who need them. On top of that, the range of opportunities available to women is limited by pervasive gender stereotypes and discriminatory practices within both households and labour markets. As a result, the vast majority of women still work in insecure, informal employment.

The reality is that women also still carry the burden of unpaid work in the home, which has been aggravated in recent years by austerity policies and cut-backs. To build more equitable and sustainable economies which work for both women and men, warns the report, “more of the same will not do.”

At a time when the global community is defining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the post-2015 era, the message from UN Women is that economic and social policies can contribute to the creation of stronger economies, and to more sustainable and more gender-equal societies, provided that they are designed and implemented with women’s rights at their centre.

Edited by Phil Harris    

A woman planting a shea tree in Ghana to protect riverbanks, and for her economic empowerment. Much still remains to be done to overcome the difficulties women – particularly rural women – face in terms of mobility and political participation. Credit: ©IFAD/Dela Sipitey

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Mar 14 2015 (IPS)

Rural women make major contributions to rural economies by producing and processing food, feeding and caring for families, generating income and contributing to the overall well-being of their households – but, in many countries, they face discrimination in access to agricultural assets, education, healthcare and employment, among others, preventing them from fully enjoying their basic rights.

Gender equality is now widely recognised as an essential component for sustainable development goals in the post-2015 agenda, with empowerment of rural women vital to enabling poor people to improve their livelihoods and overcome poverty.“To improve women’s social and economic status, we need more recognition for the vital role they play in the rural economy. Let us all work together to empower women to achieve food and nutrition security – for their sake, and the sake of their families and communities” – IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze

This year’s International Women’s Day, celebrated worldwide on Mar. 8, marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), which called on governments, the international community and civil society from all over the world to empower women and girls by taking action in 12 critical areas: poverty, education and training, health, violence, armed conflict, the economy, power and decision-making, institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women, human rights, the media, the environment and the girl child.

Despite that call, much still remains to be done to overcome the difficulties women – particularly rural women – face in terms of mobility and political participation.

“Too often, rural women are doing the backbreaking work,” Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), said on the occasion. “To improve women’s social and economic status, we need more recognition for the vital role they play in the rural economy. Let us all work together to empower women to achieve food and nutrition security – for their sake, and the sake of their families and communities.”

This year, the three Rome-based U.N. agencies – the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP) and IFAD – along with journalists and students from Rome’s LUISS, John Cabot and La Sapienza universities met to share testimonials of innovative interventions aimed at empowering rural women in four key areas: nutrition, community mobilisation, livestock and land rights.

A large body of research indicates that putting more income into the hands of women translates into improved child nutrition health and education in all developing regions of the world.

Explaining why women and men need to be involved together to move forward on nutrition, Britta Schumacher, a WFP Programme Policy Officer, described how the Renewed Efforts Against Child Hunger and Undernutrition (REACH) programme had been able to tackle malnutrition and health problems using an approach based on positive gender-oriented objectives.

The REACH programme – a joint initiative of FAO, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), WFP and the World Health Organisation (WHO) – is based on the human right to nutrition security and seeks to transform the way governments and donors approach investment in nutrition to leverage existing investments most effectively and systematically identify priorities for additional investments needed to scale up.

Noting that “the long girls stay at school, the better is their health” because “lack of awareness represents a concrete obstacle to good practices,” Schumacher said that in Bangladesh activities had been carried out under the REACH programme to transfer knowledge within and between members of communities and local authorities, boost rural women’s access to services and strengthen their self-esteem. 

Stressing the need for community mobilisation, Andrea Sanchez Enciso, Gender and Participatory Communication Specialist with FAO, illustrated one of the achievements of FAO’s Dimitra project, a participatory information and communication project which contributes to improving the visibility of rural populations, women in particular.

In Niger, she said, “the Dimitra project encouraged the inclusion of a gender perspective in communication for development initiatives in rural areas … taking greater account of the specificities, needs and aspirations of men and women” and “creating participatory spaces for discussion between men and women, access to information and collective actions in their communities.”

Leading a two-year small livestock project in Afghanistan during the Taliban period, Antonio Riota, Lead Technical Specialist in IFAD’s Livestock, Policy and Technical Advisory Division, said that the project was developed and implemented in a context in which 90 percent of village chickens were managed by women and poultry was the only source of income for the entire community.

According to Riota, the project showed how small livestock can make a difference in rural women’s lives because one of its major results has been that “now women can walk all together” whereas previously they were accused of prostitution if they did so. “Some 75,000 women benefitted from the project and profitability increased by 91 percent,” he added.

Meanwhile, Mino Ramaroson, Africa Regional Coordinator at the International Land Coalition, described two African experiences of women’s networks – the National Federation of Rural Women in Madagascar and the Kilimanjaro Initiative – advocating for their rights to land and natural resources.

In Madagascar, the National Federation of Rural Women, which aims to promote rural women’s rights, improve members’ livelihoods and increase their resilience to external and internal shocks, has been joined by more than 450 rural women’s groups from the country’s six provinces.

The Kilimanjaro Initiative, initiated by rural women in 2012 and supported by the International Land Coalition, uses women’s rights to land and productive resources as an entry point for the mobilisation of rural women from across Africa to define the future they want, claim lives of dignity they deserve and identify and overcome the challenges that hold them back.

Edited by Phil Harris   

IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanzwe (centre) joins in a traditional Fijian dance at the opening ceremony of the second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples' Forum, February 2015. Credit: IFAD

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Feb 17 2015 (IPS)

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children” – an ancient Indian saying that encapsulates the essence of sustainability as seen by the world’s indigenous people.

With their deep and locally-rooted knowledge of the natural world, indigenous peoples have much to share with the rest of the world about how to live, work and cultivate in a sustainable manner that does not jeopardise future generations.

This was the main message brought to the second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, organised by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) last week in Rome.“We have learned the relevance of the diversity and distinctiveness of peoples and rural communities and of valuing and building on their cultural identity as an asset and economic potential. The ancient voice of the natives can be the solution to many crises” – Antonella Cordone, IFAD

The Indigenous Peoples’ Forum represents a unique initiative within the U.N. system. It is a concrete expression of IFAD’s recognition of the role that indigenous peoples play in economic and social development through traditional sustainable practices and provides IFAD with an institutional mechanism for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of the agency’s engagement with indigenous peoples.

This engagement includes achievement of the objectives of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Despite major improvements in recent decades, indigenous and tribal peoples – as well as ethnic minorities – continue to be among the poorest and most marginalised people in the world.

There are over 370 million indigenous peoples in some 70 countries worldwide, with the majority living in Asia. They account for an estimated five percent of the world’s population, with 15 percent of these peoples living in poverty.  Various recent studies show that the poverty gap between indigenous peoples and other rural populations is increasing in some parts of the world.

“IFAD is making all efforts to ensure that the indigenous peoples’ voice is being heard, rights are respected and well-being is improving at the global level,” said Antonella Cordone, IFAD’s Senior Technical Specialist for Indigenous peoples and Tribal Issues.

“We have learned the relevance of the diversity and distinctiveness of peoples and rural communities and of valuing and building on their cultural identity as an asset and economic potential,” she continued. “The ancient voice of the natives can be the solution to many crises.”

As guardians of the world’s natural resources and vehicles of traditions over the years, indigenous peoples developed a holistic approach to sustainable development and, as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, highlighted during an Asia-Pacific working group session, “indigenous peoples’ livelihoods are closely interlinked with cultural heritage and identities, spirituality and governance systems.”

These livelihoods have traditionally been based on handing down lands and territories to new generations without exploiting them for maximum profit. Today, these livelihoods are threatened by climate change and third party exploitation, among others.

Climate change, to which indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable, is posing a dramatic threat through melting glaciers, advancing desertification, floods and hurricanes in coastal areas.

Long-standing pressure from logging, mining and advancing agricultural frontiers have intensified the exploitation of new energy sources, construction of roads and other infrastructures, such as dams, and have raised concerns about large-scale acquisition of land for commercial or industrial purposes, commonly known as land grabbing.

In this context, the Forum stressed the need for the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of indigenous peoples whenever development projects affect their access to land and resources, a requirement which IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanzwe said should be respected by any organisation engaging with indigenous peoples.

Poverty and loss of territories and resources by indigenous peoples due to policies or regulations adverse to traditional land use practices are compounded by frequent discrimination in labour markets, where segmentation, poor regulatory frameworks and cultural and linguistic obstacles allow very few indigenous peoples to access quality jobs and social and health services.

Moreover, indigenous peoples suffer from marginalisation from political processes and gender-based discrimination.

These are among the issues that participants at the Forum said should be taken into account in the post-2015 development agenda. They said that this agenda should be designed to encourage governments and other actors to facilitate the economic and social empowerment of poor rural people, in particular, marginalized rural groups, such as women, children and indigenous peoples.

A starting point for the architecture of the agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that expire at the end of this year was seen as the recommendations adopted during the two-day Forum (Feb. 12-13).

These included the need for a holistic approach to supporting and strengthening indigenous peoples’ food systems, recognition of traditional tenure, conservation of biodiversity,  respect for and revitalisation of cultural and spiritual values, and ensuring that projects be designed with the FPIC of indigenous peoples.

Participants said that it is important to emphasise the increasing need to strengthen the participation and inclusion of indigenous peoples in discussions at the political and operational level, because targets in at these levels can have a catalytic effect on their social and economic empowerment.

The Forum agreed that giving the voice to indigenous people and their concerns and priorities in the post-2015 agenda represents an invaluable window of opportunity for development.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Nasser Murad Safi, 15, was shot by Israeli soldiers with live ammunition breaking his leg during stone-throwing clashes between Palestinian youngsters and Israeli soldiers. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Feb 15 2015 (IPS)

Fourteen-year-old Malak al Khatib, one of the youngest Palestinian detainees and one of only a handful of girls, was released from an Israeli prison on Feb. 13 into the arms of emotional family members and supporters after being incarcerated in an Israeli prison for two months on “security offences”.

Details of what happened to the Palestinian minor were made public only after an Israeli gag order on the case was lifted on appeal after a global campaign for her release.

The slightly built, dark-haired girl, from the town of Beitin near Ramallah, was arrested in December last year and later charged with stone-throwing and possession of a knife. However, al Khatib says the confessions were coerced under duress during interrogation."[Palestinian] children have been threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault, against themselves or a family member" – UNICEF

Al Khatib was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, a suspended sentence of three months and fined 6,000 shekels (approximately 1,500 dollars).

According to volunteer organisation Military Court Watch, 151 Palestinian children are currently being held in Israeli detention for “security offences” in the Occupied Territories and within Israel.

The group added that 47 percent of these children were being held in jails inside Israel in contravention of the Geneva Convention because this limits the ability of family and legal representatives from the West Bank and Gaza to visit them.

Defence for Children International Palestine (DCIP) says that in December last year 10 Palestinian children aged between 10 and 15 were incarcerated. However, children as young as eight have also been arrested by Israeli soldiers or police. According to DCIP, Israeli forces arrest about 1,000 children every year in the occupied West Bank.

However, it is not only the large numbers of Palestinian children arrested which is of concern to human rights organisations but also their treatment during incarceration.

In 2013, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was attacked by Israeli critics after releasing a report title ‘Children in Israeli Military Detention’, which slammed the Israeli authorities for using “intimidation, threats and physical violence to coerce confessions out of Palestinian children.”

Ahmed Othman Safi, 17, bears the scars after his skull was fractured by the back of a gun as Israeli soldiers were arresting him. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

“Children have been threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault, against themselves or a family member,” the report said.

IPS spoke to two Palestinian boys from the Jelazon refugee camp, near Ramallah, who were beaten, abused during interrogation and jailed on allegations of throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli security forces and settlers.

One hundred heavily armed Israeli soldiers, their faces masked, broke down the door and stormed the home of Khalil Khaled Nakhli, 17, in the early hours of Aug. 11 last year, terrifying his six younger brothers and sisters.

“My arm was broken after the soldiers beat me as they arrested me. They accused me of throwing stones at Israeli settlers from the Beit El settlement near Jelazon camp,” Nakhli told IPS.

Nakhli was taken to an Israeli prison where he was roughed up during interrogation and eventually sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, despite refusing to admit to the charges against him.

The home of Nakhli’s friend Ahmed Othman Safi, 17, was similarly stormed in the early hours of Sep. 7 last year. This time the soldiers used explosives to blow the door open.

Safi was left bloody and his skull fractured when the arresting soldiers used the back of their guns to club him on the head. An inch-wide indentation, where the hair refuses to grow, remains on Safi’s skull to this day.

“I was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment even though they failed to force me to confess to anything,” said Safi.

Their treatment has only further angered the boys. “We all feel bitter at the way we were treated and this exacerbates our anger at living under occupation,” Safi told IPS.

Palestinian minors are treated harshly in comparison with how Israeli minors are treated following arrest.

“Two children, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who are accused of committing the same act, such as stone throwing, will receive substantially different treatment from two separate legal systems,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in a recently released report titled ‘One Rule, Two Legal Systems: Israel’s Regime of Laws in the West Bank’.

“The Israeli child will be afforded the extensive rights and protections granted to minors under Israeli law. His Palestinian counterpart will be entitled to limited rights and protections, which are not sufficient to ensure his physical and mental wellbeing and which do not sufficiently meet his unique needs as a minor,” said the report.

Moreover, in many cases, the criminal law applying to Palestinian minors is stricter and even more severe than the one applied to Israeli adults.

“If Malak al Khatib had been arrested for violent activity as an Israeli child she would have received certain rights. These were denied to her for being Palestinian,” ACRI spokesperson Nuri Moskovich told IPS.

Decades of ‘temporary’ Israeli military rule in the Occupied Territories have given rise to two separate and unequal systems of law that discriminate between Israelis and Palestinians. The legal differentiation is not restricted to security or criminal matters, but touches upon almost every aspect of daily life.

“A series of military decrees, legal rulings and legislative amendments have resulted in a situation whereby Israeli citizens living in the Occupied Territories remain under the jurisdiction of Israeli law and the Israeli court system, with all the benefits that this confers,” said ACRI.

“By contrast, Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to much stricter military legal law – military orders that have been issued by Israeli generals since 1967.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Social worker in the flat of a drug addict in Donetsk doing outreach work. Drug addicts, like other marginalised groups, including Roma, are victims of the collapse of the health system in East Ukraine. Credit: Natalia Kravchuk/International HIV/AIDS Alliance Ukraine©

By Pavol Stracansky
KIEV, Jan 28 2015 (IPS)

With international organisations warning that East Ukraine is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe as its health system collapses, marginalised groups are among those facing the greatest struggle to access even basic health care in the war-torn region.

The conflict between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces has affected more than five million people, with 1.4 million classified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and human rights bodies as “highly vulnerable” because of displacement, lack of income and a breakdown of essential services, including health care.

Fighting and accompanying measures imposed by both sides have led to medical supplies being severely interrupted or cut off entirely, hospitals destroyed or battling constant water and power cuts, and crippling staff shortages at health facilities as medical staff flee the fighting.

A complete lack of vaccines is threatening outbreaks of diseases such as polio and measles, while there are concerns for HIV/AIDS and TB sufferers as supplies of vital medicines dry up and disease monitoring becomes almost impossible.Fighting and accompanying measures imposed by both sides have led to medical supplies being severely interrupted or cut off entirely, hospitals destroyed or battling constant water and power cuts, and crippling staff shortages at health facilities as medical staff flee the fighting.

Massive internal displacement because of the conflict – latest U.N. estimates are of 700,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) with the figure rising by as much as 100,000 per week – has also left hundreds of thousands living in sometimes desperate and unhygienic conditions, creating a further health risk and the chance that infectious diseases, such as TB, will spread.

But while there is a threat to healthcare provision from collapsing resources, some in the region are facing extra barriers to accessing health care.

Ukraine has one of the worst HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world and the spread of the disease has been fuelled mainly by injection drug use. But, unlike in many Eastern European states, the country has been running for more than a decade an internationally lauded range of harm reduction programmes which have been credited with checking the disease’s spread.

These have included opioid substitution therapy (OST) programmes available to drug users across the country. These are particularly important in East Ukraine because the majority of Ukraine’s injection drug users come from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

But local and international organisations working with drug users say that addicts’ access to life-saving treatment in those areas has come under increasing pressure since the start of the conflict and that it could be cut off entirely within weeks as supplies of methadone and buprenorphine used in the treatment run out and cannot be replaced.

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance Ukraine which runs many OST centres as well as other harm reduction programmes, has said that stocks of antiretroviral drugs, OST and other life-saving treatments will have run out by  February.  More than 300 OST patients in Donetsk and Luhansk have lost access to treatment since the conflict began, while a further 550 patients on methadone will run out of drugs soon if emergency supplies cannot be delivered.

U.N. officials in close contact with international organisations helping drug users as well as doctors in Donetsk have confirmed to IPS that clinics have only a few weeks’ worth of stocks of methadone left.

One doctor in Donetsk working on an OST programme, who asked not to be named, told IPS:  “There are serious problems with medicine supplies. The last shipments came in September last year and some patients have already had to finish their treatments. Many had been on it for a decade and in that time had forged new lives, put their, sometimes criminal, past behind them and had families. It was absolutely tragic for them when they stopped.”

It is unclear what will happen to all those no longer able to access OST treatment. Doctors say some have gone into detoxification, while others have moved to other cities in safer areas of Ukraine in the hope of continuing OST.

But with 60 percent of those receiving OST also being HIV positive, according to the Donetsk doctor, and reports that many are now turning to illicit drugs and needle-sharing again as access to OST is cut off, there are concerns that the disease, along with Hepatitis C which is rife among injection drug users, and tuberculosis, could be spread, and that the lives of many drug users will again be at risk.

OST patient Andriy Klinemko, who was forced to flee Donetsk with his wife when their house was destroyed in bombing last summer and who is now in Dnipropetrovsk in central Ukraine, told IPS: “OST patients in East Ukraine are being forced to move, but not all of them can and even those that make it to other regions may not be able to continue OST because there is no money left to run such programmes. It’s a bad situation and at the moment I really can’t see any way it’s going to get better.”

But drug users are not the only marginalised community struggling to access health care.

Historically, the estimated 400,000-strong Roma community in Ukraine has, like Roma in many other Eastern European states, faced widespread discrimination in society, including in employment and education.

They have also always had limited access to healthcare because many Roma lack official ID documentation which makes it difficult for many to obtain official health care, while widespread poverty also means services and medicines which require any payment are also inaccessible to most. Meanwhile, many Roma settlements are in remote locations, far away from the nearest health centres.

Dr Dorit Nitzan, head of the WHO’s Ukraine Office, told IPS: “Even before the conflict, Roma in Ukraine had limited access to curative and preventive health service. As a result, Roma children have extremely low vaccination coverage. Moreover, rates of tuberculosis and other communicable and non-communicable diseases are higher among Roma than in the general population.”

Discrimination is also a problem. Zola Kondur of the Chiricli Roma rights group in Ukraine, told IPS: “In terms of healthcare, Roma are among the most vulnerable in the country. They are treated badly because of their ethnicity.”

However, the problems for Roma have dramatically worsened since the conflict began. Some human rights groups have said that since the separatist regimes took power in the region, Roma have faced systematic violent and sometimes fatal repression.

According to a report this month of an international mission to monitor human rights

by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, Roma living in separatist-controlled areas have been “subjected to open aggression from militants ….[who] have carried out real ethnic cleansing” against them. Many have fled and become IDPs, subsequently facing health struggles.

Dr Nitzan said: “As in every crisis, if not given special attention, marginalised and vulnerable groups are at higher risk. In Ukraine, many Roma lack civil documentation, and thus cannot be registered as internally displaced persons and are not included in the provision of any health services.

“Moreover, their inability to pay ‘out-of-pocket’ limits their ability to procure medication and/or services. Compounding this is that many Roma IDPs are residing at the margins of society, in remote geographical locations, where no services are available. All of these factors make health services inaccessible to Roma.”

Local rights groups say that Roma who have managed to flee to safe areas have often ended up homeless and starving after facing problems accessing aid because of a dismissive attitude from volunteers and staff at social institutions, while their lack of identification documents also prevented them from accessing any official help.

However, even those who have managed to find treatment have sometimes faced further problems.

Kondur told IPS: “In one case a Roma family moved from Kramatorsk to Kharkiv. A little boy had a heart problem brought on by the stress of the fighting and he was taken to hospital. One night, a group of young people broke the window of the boy’s hospital room, shouting ‘Gypsies get out’. The boy had a heart attack.”

Edited by Phil Harris

Banner in the village of Fidae (near Byblos) which reads: "The municipality of Al Fidae announces that there is a curfew for all foreigners inside the village every day from 8 pm to 5.30 am". Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
BEIRUT, Nov 21 2014 (IPS)

Staring at the floor, Hassan, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee from Idlib in northwestern Syria, holds a set of identification papers in his hands. He picks out a small pink piece of paper with a few words on it stating that he must obtain a work contract, otherwise his residency visa will not be renewed.

Hassan (not his real name) has been given two months to find an employer willing to cough up for a work permit, something extremely unlikely to happen. After that, his presence in Lebanon will be deemed illegal.

Hassan, who fled Syria almost three years ago to avoid military service, tells IPS that all that awaits him if he returns are jail, the army or death, so he has decided that living in Lebanon illegally after his visa expires is his best bet.Hassan, who fled Syria almost three years ago to avoid military service … [says that] all that awaits him if he returns are jail, the army or death, so he has decided that living in Lebanon illegally after his visa expires is his best bet.

Sitting next to Hassan is 24-year-old Ahmed (not his real name) from Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, who lost his residency one month ago. Since then he has been forced to watch his movements. “I live with permanent fear of being caught by the police and deported,” he says.

Since the start of Syria’s civil war in March 2011, over 1.2 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon, where they now account for almost one-third of the Lebanese population.

Particularly since May, the Lebanese government has increasingly introduced measures to limit the influx of Syrian refugees into the country. Speaking after a cabinet meeting on Oct. 23, Information Minister Ramzi Jreij announced that the government had reached a decision “to stop welcoming displaced persons, barring exceptional cases, and to ask the U.N. refugee agency [UNHCR] to stop registering the displaced.”

Dalia Aranki, Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance Advisor at the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told IPS that Lebanon “is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention” and, as a result, “is not obliged to meet all obligations resulting from the Convention.”

“Being registered with UNHCR in Lebanon can provide some legal protection and is important for access to services,” she wrote together with Olivia Kalis in a recent article published by Forced Migration Review. “But it does not grant refugees the right to seek asylum, have legal stay or refugee status. This leaves refugees in a challenging situation.”

Current legal restrictions affect the admission of newcomers, renewal of residency visas and the regularisation of visa applications for those who have entered the country through unofficial border crossings.

One aid worker who is providing assistance to Syrian refugees in Mount Lebanon told IPS that the majority of the Syrian beneficiaries they are working with no longer have a legal residency visa.

Aranki notes that fear of being arrested often forces those without legal residency papers to limit their movements and also their ability to access various services, to obtain a lease contract or find employment is severely limited. It could also impede birth registration for refugees -with the consequent risk of statelessness, or force family separations on the border.

Before May this year, Syrians could usually enter Lebanon as “tourists” and obtain a residency visa for six months (renewable every six months for up to three years), although this process cost 200 dollars a year, which already was financially prohibitive for many refugee families.

However, NRC has noted that under new regulations Syrians are only permitted to enter Lebanon in exceptional or humanitarian cases such as for medical reasons, or if the applicant has an onward flight booked out of the country, an appointment at an embassy, a valid work permit, or is deemed a “wealthy” tourist. Since summer 2013, restrictions for Palestinian refugees from Syria have become even more severe.

Under its new policy, the Lebanese government also intends to participate in the registration of new refugees together with the UNHCR. Khalil Gebara, an advisor to Minister of Interior Nohad Machnouk, says that the government has taken these measures for two reasons.

“First, because the government decided that it needs to have a joint sovereign decision over the issue of how to treat the Syrian crisis. (…) Previously, it was UNHCR to decide who was deemed a refugee and who was not, the Lebanese government was not involved in this process.”

Secondly “because government believes that there are a lot of Syrians registered who are abusing the system. A lot of them are economic migrants living in Lebanon and they are registered with the United Nations. The government wants to specify who really deserves to be a refugee and who does not”.

Ron Redmond, a UNHCR spokesperson, said that the U.N. agency has “for a long time” encouraged the Lebanese government to assume a role in the registration of new refugees and affirms that registration is going on.

“There is concern about the protection of refugees but there is also understanding on UNHCR’s part,” said Redmond. “Lebanon has legitimate security, demographic and social concerns.”

Meanwhile, accompanying the increasing fear of deportation from Lebanon, Syrian refugees have also been forced to deal with routine forms of discrimination.

Over 45 municipalities across Lebanon have imposed curfews restricting the movement of Syrians during night-time hours, measures which, according to Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Director Nadim Houry, contravene “international human rights law and appear to be illegal under Lebanese law.”

Attacks targeting unarmed Syrians – particularly since clashes between the Lebanese army and gunmen affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Arsal in August – have  also occurred.

Given such realities, life in Lebanon for Hassan, Ahmed and many other Syrian refugees, is becoming a new exile, stuck between a rock and a hard place.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

"Who is more concerned than the rural family with regards to preservation of natural resources for future generations?" – Pope Francis. Credit: By CIAT [CC-BY-SA-2.0] via Wikimedia Commons

By Gloria Schiavi
ROME, Oct 17 2014 (IPS)

“Who is more concerned than the rural family with regards to preservation of natural resources for future generations?”

Pope Francis posed the question in a message read by Archbishop Luigi Travaglino, Permanent Observer of the Holy See for the celebration of World Food Day on Oct. 16 at the headquarters of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The Pope’s message went to the heart of this year’s World Food Day theme – Family Farming: Feeding the Planet, Caring for the Earth – as part of the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF).

The celebration of World Food Day offered an opportunity to share experiences and steps forward towards the eradication of hunger in a way that is sustainable for the future.

“Family farming is key in this effort”, said FAO Director-General José Graziano Da Silva, praising the contributions of farmers around the world. “For decades they were seen as a problem to be dealt with. The truth is that they are an important part of the solution to sustainable food security.”"For decades they [family farmers] were seen as a problem to be dealt with. The truth is that they are an important part of the solution to sustainable food security" – FAO Director-General José Graziano Da Silva

Food insecurity within the context of a growing world population, increasingly disruptive climate change and environmental destruction, scarce access to land and resources, discrimination against women and lack of financial support for smallholders and youth were some of the problems that were recognised as crucial in the global struggle to feed all.

Sustainable development and smart agriculture, climate change mitigation and adaptation to changing and more extreme conditions were raised as necessary strategies.

FAO figures show that increasing production is not the silver bullet – the world already produces 40 percent more than is needed.

Leslie Lipper, Senior Environmental Economist at FAO’s Economic and Social Department, raised the problem of access: “Today there is enough food in the world for everybody to be food secure, and we still have over 809 million people that are food insecure.”

“They don’t have the means to either buy or in some way get the food they need. We are looking at the need for an agriculture world strategy that increases income, not just production”, she added.

From a social perspective, Giuseppe Castiglione, Undersecretary at the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry Policy, highlighted the role of family farmers in terms of employment and social inclusion, saying that they offer the opportunity of involving vulnerable people in a familiar working environment that is more welcoming than other forms of employment.

The International Year of Family Farming has been a demonstration of what the United Nations system does well: gathering people, starting dialogue, creating platforms for discussion, raising awareness and sharing knowledge.

In this context, many speakers called for policy-makers to follow up and implement strategies that permit the creation of supporting infrastructures. In fact, farmers’ challenges include distributing food efficiently, gaining access to markets and financial investments, reducing waste and improving quality.

“Financial services enable farmers to generate income and insulate themselves from income shocks”, said Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development.

“Even a small amount of savings can mean that a mother does not have to sell her chickens or other income-earning assets in order to pay a doctor’s fee,” she added.

The crucial role of women as the backbone of agricultural production was not forgotten, and every speaker called for recognition of their role and for gender equality.

Santiago Del Solar Dorrego, Argentine agronomist and former president of a farmer group, suggested that while innovation is crucial, farmers should not go down that path alone if they do not have the scale to absorb the shock of failure. “Go together,” he said.

Jorge Anrango, responsible for food in rural and indigenous communities in the Ecuador delegation to FAO, talked to IPS about the experience of his country. “Everybody wanted to study, study, study. Nobody wanted to cultivate land”, he said, explaining that the IYFF has raised awareness of the importance of farming and has spurred people to return to the fields.

John Kufuor, former President of Ghana, highlighted the need for political leadership in policy-making for agriculture. He said that the 30 percent increase in rice production in his country had been made possible through offering landless people, women and youth degraded but usable land plots.

By providing them with access to training, markets and services, it had been possible to involve them in a system of plantation development and profit sharing and this programme had created jobs and improved income, food security and nutrition.

In a reference to the recent natural disasters that have hit the host country, Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, a movement promoting local food systems, said that the floods and landslides that affected parts of northern Italy earlier in the month were the result of terrible hydrogeological conditions.

This, he explained, was because while family farmers used to clean canals and rivers and to ensure that the land was looked after, their role had been weakened, negatively affecting the public service they had once provided.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Women are the backbone of the farming sector and have a crucial role to play in improving nutrition through food preparation and the education of children. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

By Gloria Schiavi
ROME, Oct 15 2014 (IPS)

It does not make the headlines, but 2014 is the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF) and family farming will be centre-stage at this year’s World Food Day on Oct. 16 at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

“If we are serious about fighting hunger we need to promote family farming as a way of production and also […] as a way of life. It is much more than a way of agricultural production”, says Marcela Villarreal, Director of FAO’s Office for Partnerships, Advocacy and Capacity Development.

According to FAO, family farming – which is the largest employer in the world – can help combat hunger and poverty and contribute to healthy food systems. It can also play a role in protecting the environment and managing natural resources in a sustainable way.Family farming is estimated to provide 70 percent of the food produced in the world, sustain 40 percent of households worldwide and is twice more effective in reducing poverty than any other productive sector.

There is no official definition for family farming, which sometimes replaces the term ‘smallholders’, but its key features are family ownership and the use of mainly non-wage labour provided by family members.

Family farming is estimated to provide 70 percent of the food produced in the world, sustain 40 percent of households worldwide and is twice more effective in reducing poverty than any other productive sector.

A FAO working paper, which used figures from the World Census of Agriculture, calculates that “there are more than 570 million farms in the world and more than 500 million of these are owned by families.”

The paper also notes that 84 percent of the world’s farms are smaller than two hectares and operate on about 12 percent of the world’s farmland. The remaining 16 percent of farms are larger than two hectares and represent 88 percent of farmland.

East and South Asia along with the Pacific account for 74 percent of the 570 million farms, with China and India accounting for 35 and 24 percent respectively. Only three percent of farms are located in the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean represent four percent each.

Farmers’ organisations from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania met in Abu Dhabi in January at the start of IYFF and issued a set of five demands to make family farming the “cornerstone of solid sustainable rural development, conceived of as an integral part of the global and harmonised development of each nation and each people while preserving the environment and natural resources.”

Among others, they called for strategies to attract young people and prevent migration, creating the conditions for them to take over their parents’ farms or set up new farms.

With regards to gender equality, they criticised discrimination over inheritance rules and wages as unacceptable, saying that women are the backbone of the farming sector and have a crucial role to play in improving nutrition through food preparation and the education of children.

The farmers’ organisations also called on governments to finance the creation of cooperatives, and guarantee access to markets and loans for smallholders.

According to José Antonio Osaba, Coordinator of the IYFF-2014 Civil Society Programme of the World Rural Forum, all nations, and especially developing nations, “have the right to protect their agriculture so as to be able to feed themselves and trade under equitable conditions … the reverse is now the case: a small handful of major exporting nations with high productivity levels and considerable subsidies dominate the world food market.”

Ranja Sengupta, senior researcher at the Third World Network in India, shares Osaba’s position. On the side-lines of the Asia-Europe Peoples’ Forum held in Milan, Italy, on Oct. 10-12, she told IPS that free trade agreements pose a serious problem for the capability of developing countries to sustain their people.

“I think in countries like India, large countries with a large, hungry population, there is no alternative to strengthening small family-based farms”, she said.

“We cannot depend on imported food. So for us, if we have to provide food to our people, we have to take it from our producers and we have to ensure that they are able to produce; that’s why we do need to give essential subsidies – at least for now”, she added.

“It is something which should be non-negotiable for any developing country government and no global agreement should be able to actually say ‘no’ to that”, Sengupta concluded.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Irina was 21 when she first started using drugs. More than 30 years later, having lost her husband, her home and her business to drugs, she is still battling her addiction.

But, like almost all female drug addicts in this former Soviet state, she has faced a desperate struggle not only with her drug problem, but with accessing help in the face of institutionalised and systematic discrimination because of her gender.

“Georgia’s society is very male-dominated,” she told IPS. “And this is reflected in the attitudes to drugs. It’s as if it’s OK for men to use drugs but not women. For women, the stigma of drug use is massive. There are many women who do not join programmes helping them as they would rather not be seen there.”

Women make up 10 per cent of the estimated 40,000 drug users in Georgia, according to research by local NGOs working with drug users.“Georgia’s society is very male-dominated and this is reflected in the attitudes to drugs. It’s as if it’s OK for men to use drugs but not women. For women, the stigma of drug use is massive. There are many women who do not join programmes helping them as they would rather not be seen there” – Irina, now in her 50s, who has been taking drugs for 30 years

However, because of very strong gender stereotyping, women users have very low access to harm reduction services – only 4 percent of needle exchange programme clients are women and the figure is even less for methadone treatment.

Local activists say this startling discrepancy is down to the massive social stigma faced by women drug users.

Dasha Ocheret, Deputy Director for Advocacy at the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network (EHRN) told IPS: “In traditional societies, like Georgia’s, there is a much stronger negative attitude to women who use drugs than to men who use drugs. Women are supposed to be wives and mothers, not drug users.”

Many female addicts are scared to access needle exchanges or other harm reduction services because they fear their addiction will become known to their families or the police. Many have found themselves the victims of violence as their own families try to exert control over them once their drug use has been revealed. Others fear their drug use will be reported to the authorities by health workers.

Registered women drug users can have their children taken away while they routinely face violence – over 80 percent of women who use drugs in Georgia experience violence, according to the Georgian Harm Reduction Network– and extortion at the hands of police helping to enforce some of the world’s harshest drug laws. Possession of cannabis, for example, can result in an 11-year jail sentence.

Irina, who admits that she arranges anonymous attendance at an opioid substitution therapy (OST) programme so that as few people as possible can see her there, told IPS that she had herself been assaulted by a police officer and that police automatically viewed all female drug users as “criminals”.

But those who do want to access such services face further barriers because of their gender.

Free methadone substitution programmes in the country are extremely limited and because levels of financial autonomy among women in Georgia are low, other similar programmes are too expensive for many female addicts.

Discrimination is not uncommon among health service workers. Although some say that they have been treated by very sympathetic doctors, other female drug users have complained of abuse and denigration by medical staff and in some cases being denied health care because of their drug use.

Pregnant women are discouraged from accessing OST, despite it being shown to be safe in pregnancy and resulting in better health outcomes for both mother and child.

Eka Iakobishvili, EHRN’s Human Rights Programme Manager, told IPS: “Pregnant women don’t have access to certain services – they are strongly advised by doctors and health care workers to abort a baby rather than get methadone substitution treatment because they are told the treatment will harm the baby.”

While some may then undergo abortions, others will not, instead continuing dangerous drug use and the potential risk of contracting HIV/AIDS which could then be passed on to their child.

Meanwhile, those harm reduction services accessible by women are not gender-sensitive, according to campaigners, who say that female drug users need access to centres and programmes run and attended only by women.

Irina told IPS: “On some [harm reduction] programmes, the male drug users there will abuse the women drug users for taking drugs. This puts a lot of women off attending these programmes.”

She said that she had asked for a women-only service to be set up at the OST centre she attends but that it had been rejected on the grounds that only a few women were enrolled in it.

Together, these factors mean that many women are unable to access health services and continue dangerous drug-taking behaviour, sharing needles and injecting home-made drug cocktails made up of anything, including disinfectants and petrol mixed with over the counter medicines.

But there is hope that the situation may be about to change, at least to some degree, as local and international groups press to have the problem addressed.

At the end of July, CEDAW (UN Commission on Elimination of Discrimination against Women) released a set of recommendations for the Georgian government to ensure that women obtain proper access to harm reduction services after local NGOs submitted reports on the levels of discrimination they face.

These include, among others, specific calls for the government to carry out nationwide studies to establish the exact number of women who use drugs, including while pregnant, to help draw up a strategic plan to tackle the problem, and to provide gender-sensitive and evidence-based harm reduction services for women who use drugs.

The government has yet to react publicly to the recommendations but local campaigners have said they are speaking to government departments about them and are preparing to follow up with them on the recommendations.

Tea Kordzadze, Project Manager at the Georgian Harm Reduction Network in Tibilisi, told IPS: “We are hoping that at least some of the recommendations will be implemented.”

The Georgian government has been keen to show the country is ready to embrace Western values and bring its legislation and standards into line with European nations in recent years as it looks to create closer ties to the European Union. Rights activists say that this could come into play when the government considers the recommendations.

Iakobishvili said: “These are of course just recommendations and the government is not obliged at all to accept or implement any of them. But, having said that, Georgia does care what other countries and big international rights organisations like Amnesty International and so on say about the country.”

Irina told IPS that only outside pressure would bring any real change. “The European Union, the Council of Europe and other international bodies need to put pressure on the Georgian government to make sure that the recommendations don’t remain on paper only.”

But, she added, “in any case, the recommendations alone won’t be enough. The whole attitude in society to women drug users is very negative. It has to be changed.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Amid escalating conflicts and rampant violations of human rights all over the world, spreading “human rights education” is not an easy task. But a non-governmental organisation from Japan is beginning to make an impact through its “global citizenship education” approach.

At the current annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which began on Sep. 8, two side events marked the beginning of what promises to be a sustained campaign to spread human rights education (HRE).

Alongside the first, the launch of the web resource “The Right to Human Rights Education” by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a special workshop was also convened on HRE for media professionals and journalists.

The workshop was an initiative of the NGO Working Group on HRE chaired by Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a prominent NGO from Japan fighting for the abolition of nuclear weapons, sustainable development and human rights education.“It is important to raise awareness of human rights education among media professionals and journalists who are invariably caught in the crossfire of conflicts” – Kazunari Fujii, Soka Gakkai International

“This is the first time that the NGO Working Group on Human Rights Education and Learning and a group of seven countries representing the Platform for Human Rights Education and Training have organised a workshop on human rights education for media professionals and journalists,” said Kazunari Fujii, SGI’s Geneva representative.

Fujii has been working among human rights pressure groups in Geneva to mobilise support for intensifying HRE campaigning. “Through the promotion of human rights education, SGI wants to foster a culture of human rights that prevents violations from occurring in the first place,“ Fujii told IPS after the workshop on Tuesday (Sep. 16).

“While protection of human rights is the core objective of the U.N. Charter, it is equally important to prevent the occurrence of human rights abuses,” he argued.

Citing SGI President Daisaku Ikeda’s central message to foster a “culture of human rights”, Fujii said his mission in Geneva is to bring about solidarity among NGOs for achieving SGI’s major goals on human rights, nuclear disarmament and sustainable development.

The current session of the Human Rights Council, which will end on Sep. 26, is grappling with a range of festering conflicts in different parts of the world. “From a human rights perspective, it is clear that the immediate and urgent priority of the international community should be to halt the increasingly conjoined conflicts in Iraq and Syria,” said Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the new U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“In particular, dedicated efforts are urgently needed to protect religious and ethnic groups, children – who are at risk of forcible recruitment and sexual violence – and women, who have been the targets of severe restrictions,” Al Hussein said in his maiden speech to the Council.

“The second step, as my predecessor [Navanetham Pillay] consistently stressed, must be to ensure accountability for gross violations of human rights and international crimes,” he continued, arguing that “impunity can only lead to further conflicts and abuses, as revenge festers and the wrong lessons are learned.”

Al Hussein, who comes from the Jordanian royal family, wants the Council to address the underlying factors of crises, particularly the “corrupt and discriminatory political systems that disenfranchised large parts of the population and leaders who oppressed or violently attacked independent actors of civil society”.

Among others, he stressed the need to end “persistent discrimination and impunity” underlying the Israel-Palestine conflict – in which 2131 Palestinians were killed during the latest crisis in Gaza, including 1,473 civilians, 501 of them children, and 71 Israelis.

The current session of the Human Rights Council is also scheduled to discuss issues such as basic economic and livelihood rights, which are going to be addressed through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the worsening plight of migrants around the world, and the detention of asylum seekers and migrants, including children in the United States.

“Clearly, a number of human rights violations and the worsening plight of indigenous people are major issues that need to be tackled on a sustained basis,” said Fujii. “But it is important to raise the awareness of human rights education among media professionals and journalists who are invariably caught in the crossfire of conflicts.”

During open discussion at the media professionals and journalists workshop, several reporters not only shared their personal experiences but also sought clarity on how reporters can safeguard human rights in conflicts where they are embedded with occupying forces in Iraq or other countries.

“This is a major issue that needs to be addressed because it is difficult for journalists to respect human rights when they are embedded with forces,” Oliver Rizzi Carlson, a representative of the United Network of Young Peacebuilders, told IPS.

Commenting on the work that remains to be done in spreading global citizenship education, Fujii noted that tangible progress has been made by bringing several human rights pressure groups together in intensifying the campaign for human rights education.

“Solidarity within civil society and increasing recognition for our work from member states is bringing about tangible results,” said Fujii. “The formation of an NGO coalition – HR 2020 – comprising 14 NGOs such as Amnesty International and SGI last year is a significant development in the intensification of our campaign.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

LGBT flag map of Georgia. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

By Pavol Stracansky
TBILISI, Sep 8 2014 (IPS)

Georgia’s LGBT community is sceptical that recently-introduced anti-discrimination legislation hailed by some rights groups as a bold step forward for the former Soviet state will improve their lives any time soon.

The law, which came into effect in May this year, is ostensibly designed to provide protection for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in a country where homophobia is deep-rooted at all levels of society and LGBT groups face daily discrimination.

But activists in Georgia say that introduction of the legislation has actually hardened attitudes against the LGBT community and that there are serious concerns over how effectively it can be applied.“Since the law was passed, things are actually worse now for LGBT people. When they make a complaint about something, people just say, ‘what more do you want? You’ve got your rights now in law’. It’s really obnoxious” – Irakli Vacharadze, head of Identoba, the Tbilisi-based rights organisation

Irakli Vacharadze, head of Identoba, the Tbilisi-based rights organisation, told IPS: “Since the law was passed, things are actually worse now for LGBT people. When they make a complaint about something, people just say, ‘what more do you want? You’ve got your rights now in law’. It’s really obnoxious.

“There are also questions over how it is going to be applied and at the moment, at least, it is definitely not effective.”

With a deeply religious society – 84 percent of the population identifies itself as Orthodox Christian – attitudes in Georgia to anything other than traditional heterosexual relationships are deeply negative among much of the population.

LGBT people say that they are often refused service by businesses and hospitals, bullied in school, and harassed by the police. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church, which has a hugely influential role in society, has denounced LGBT equality and described support for LGBT rights as the “propaganda of sin”.

A 2013 survey by Identoba revealed how entrenched anti-LGBT sentiment is in society – 88 percent of respondents said homosexuality could “never be justified”.

A peaceful gay rights march marking International Day Against Homophobia last year ended in violence as protestors from a rival church-led counter-demonstration attacked and beat LGBT demonstrators.

But the country’s pursuit of closer ties with the European Union forced political parties, which had previously been at best apathetic towards the LGBT community, to address the issue.

As a condition of being granted coveted visa-free travel to EU countries, the government was told it had to implement anti-discrimination laws, including legislation specifically on gender expression and sexual orientation.

And although fiercely opposed by the Church, they were passed with the general support of all political parties.

However, LGBT people in Georgia remain far from convinced that, in its present form, it will help them. Although welcomed as a step forward, rights groups have criticised the fact that a devoted enforcement body was not approved and instead cases will go to the Ombudsman for Human Rights.

They say that the Ombudsman’s office lacks capacity and that effectively dealing with complaints will be compromised. They have called for the passage of additional measures to ensure enforcement of the law.

The Ombudsman’s office has yet to set up a department to deal with anti-discrimination complaints brought under the new legislation and one will not be functional before January.

Meanwhile, faith, or rather lack of it, in the country’s justice system is also likely to limit its effectiveness.

Viorel Ursu, Regional Manager of the Eurasia Programme at the Open Society Foundation, told IPS: “People do not trust the judiciary in general in Georgia. They feel that even when they bring legal action, there is no guarantee that justice will be served. And although there are laws designed to protect against discrimination of LGBT people, they will still face discrimination anyway.”

Activists are under no illusions about what the laws will bring the LGBT community. When asked whether he expected things to get better for LGBT people in Georgia in the near future, Vacharadze said: “Definitely not. There’s no chance.”

But the introduction of the legislation has already had at least one potentially positive effect. LGBT people say a profound ignorance of their gender expression and sexual orientation and their lifestyles contributes to the widespread antipathy towards them in Georgian society, but passage of the laws has at least promoted vitally-needed public discussion of the LGBT community.

Vacharadze told IPS: “The law alone will not change society’s attitudes towards LGBT people, it won’t get rid of homophobia. It won’t do anything to deal with the ignorance about LGBT issues and the community.

“The way to deal with it is to get information about LGBT out to the public and get them informed. One thing about the passage of this legislation was that it did actually create a debate about LGBT people in Georgia and got information about them out into the public and got people discussing it.”

The laws also have a wider significance in that they stand in stark contrast to the repression of LGBT communities in other former Soviet states, most notably Russia which is increasing its persecution of homosexuals through repressive legislation.

Just this week, the senior political figure in recently-annexed Crimea typified the Russian political stance to non-heterosexuals when he attacked LGBT people at a government meeting.

Sergei Aksyonov, leader of the new Russian region, said that if LGBT people held any meetings “police and self-defence forces will react immediately and in three minutes will explain to them what kind of sexual orientation they should stick to.”

He also said that “Crimean children should be brought up with a ‘positive attitude to family and traditional values’,” and that Crimea had “no need” for gays and lesbians.

Some observers say that the passing of the laws in Georgia, at a time when neighbours and other former Soviet states are attacking LGBT people, is proof that the country is set on moving closer to Europe and putting as much political distance between it and Russia, which has annexed some of its territory in recent years.

Indeed, as political parties debated the anti-discrimination laws, Davit Usupashvili, the parliamentary speaker, described the bill as a choice between Russia and the European Union.

Campaigners say that the government’s desire to cultivate closer and closer ties to the EU means that the legislation will, in time, become effective.

Ursu told IPS: “In the next year or so, the Georgian government should look to strengthen the law and try to prove that it is functioning simply because it remains under the scrutiny of the EU.

“The law not only had to be adopted but it also needed to be shown to be working effectively. It is in the government’s interest to ensure that it can be applied effectively.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

At a time when HIV rates have stabilised or declined elsewhere, the epidemic is still advancing in the Arab world, exacerbated by factors such as political unrest, conflict, poverty and lack of awareness due to social taboos.

According to UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS), an estimated 270,000 people were living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2012.

“It is true that the Arab region has a low prevalence of infection, however it has the fastest growing epidemic in the world,“ warns Dr Khadija Moalla, an independent consultant on human rights/gender/civil society/HIV-AIDS.With the exception of Somalia and Djibouti, the [HIV] epidemic is generally concentrated in vulnerable populations at higher risk, such as men-who-have-sex-with-men, female and male sex workers, and injecting drugs users

The United Nations estimates that there were 31,000 new cases and 16,500 new deaths in 2012 alone. “Infections grew by 74 percent between 2001 and 2012 while AIDS-related deaths almost tripled,” says Dr Matta Matta, an infection specialist based at the Bellevue Hospital in Lebanon.

However, both Moalla and Matta explain that figures can be often misleading in the region, due to under-reporting and the absence of consistent and accurate surveys.

With the exception of Somalia and Djibouti, the epidemic is generally concentrated in vulnerable populations at higher risk, such as men-who-have-sex-with-men, female and male sex workers, and injecting drugs users.

In Libya, for example, 90 percent of those in the latter category also live with HIV, notes Matta. Furthermore, adds Moalla, most Arab countries do not have programmes allowing for exchange of syringes.

The legal framework criminalising such activities in most Arab countries means that it is difficult to reach out to specific groups.  With the exception of Tunisia, which recognises legalised sex work, female sex workers who work clandestinely in other countries are not safeguarded by law and thus cannot force their clients to use protection, which allows for the spread of disease.

Lack of awareness, the absence of voluntary testing and of sexual education, social taboos, as well as poverty, are among the factors driving HIV in the region. “Arab governments and societies deny the epidemic and the absence of voluntary testing means that for every infected person we have ten others that we do not know about,” stresses Moalla.

People living with HIV or those at risk face discrimination and stigma.  “More than half of the people living with HIV in Egypt have been denied treatment in healthcare facilities,” explains Matta.

This bleak scenario is compounded by the security challenges prevailing in the region which not only make it difficult to deliver prevention and other programmes, but also restrict access to services by those on treatment and cause displacement and loss of follow-up according to the UNAIDS report.

The war in Iraq that began in 2003, for example, led to the destruction of most of the country’s programmes and facilities under the National AIDS Programme and, according to Moalla, the national aids centre in Libya was recently burnt down.

In addition, in some countries, conflict has significantly increased the vulnerability of women. By 2012, for example, only eight percent of the estimated number of pregnant women living with HIV in the MENA region received appropriate treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission according to the UNAIDS report.

Meanwhile, only a few governments have worked on effective programmes to fight the epidemic, although there are signs of the emergence of NGOs tackling the problem with people living with HIV and providing them with support.

“North African countries and Lebanon have generally done better than others, while Gulf countries are doing the least,” says Moalla, adding that less than one in five people living with HIV are receiving the medicines they need in the Arab region.

While some efforts have been made with the UNDP HIV Regional Programme pioneering legal reform in several countries, as well as drafting an Arab convention on protection of the rights of people living with HIV in partnership with the League of Arab States, these are not enough.

“The Arab world attitude taking the high moral ground on the issue of HIV is no barrier for the epidemic,” says Matta. “The region’s governments need to address a growing problem that is only worsened by the general upheaval.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

As the region is rocked by violence against a backdrop of the rise of radical groups, Jordan’s lesbian gay bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community fears that new instability in the Hashemite kingdom could lead to increased intolerance towards the community. 

The Jabal Amman historical district, crisscrossed by quaint streets, cafés and art galleries has become a hub for the Jordanian capital’s LGBT community.

“Jordan does not have any laws against homosexuality; it does not, however, protect civil liberties for people facing discrimination on basis of their sexual preferences,” says Madian, a local activist. “Jordan does not have any laws against homosexuality; it does not, however, protect civil liberties for people facing discrimination on basis of their sexual preferences” - Madian, a Jordanian activist

Despite the absence of any article in Jordanian law that explicitly outlaws homosexual acts, there have been several crackdowns on members of the gay community. “The targeting of the LGBT community is not something that is systematic, but it still happens from time to time,” says George Azzi, head of the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality.

In October 2008, security forces in Amman “launched a campaign that targets ‘homosexuals’,” after security forces verified that they were gathering and meeting up at a park near a private hospital in Amman, according to a study on Law and Homosexuality: Survey and Analysis of Legislation Across the Arab World by Walid Ferchichit.

In the last few years, a few arrests have been made on the margin of private parties. Most of the arrests were made under the vaguely worded indecency law and the need to “respect the values of the Arab and Islamic nation”, although the arrests were rarely followed by formal charges.

The Hashemite Kingdom is an Islamic country, where homosexuality is considered as a sin. “Some members of the LGBT community have even been arrested for satanic worshipping,” notes Madian.

The basic form of social organisation in Jordan is heavily influenced by tribalism, which weighs on social norms and relations between people. “Members of the LGBT community fall prey to discrimination or violence not necessarily at the hand of the state but of society or their families,” says Azzi.

He recalls two members of the gay community who had to be smuggled out of Jordan to escape the wrath of their families who discovered their sexual preferences, and possible death.

Credit: LGBT Jordan on Twitter

“I know of four people at least who were killed in last few years for this reason,” says Madian.

He also says that while some victims have been the target of honour killings, others have been killed by gangs because they had to seek impoverished and dangerous areas for sexual favours to avoid the scrutiny of friends and families.

Nevertheless, despite such individual cases, the topic of homosexuality seems to be increasingly tolerated in Jordan. In 2012, a book called “Arous Amman” (Amman’s fiancée) by Fadi Zaghmout was published, featuring a homosexual character who was driven to marry a woman despite being gay.

Increasingly, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are advocating gay rights and the LGBT community in the country.

“The LGBT community has been able to carve a space for itself in society, while staying away from anything that could raise its profile,” says Adam Coogle, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

But, with social and cultural mores considering homosexuality a sin and unnatural, advocating rights remains a taboo in the Hashemite Kingdom, and LGBT activism a somewhat difficult task. “We tried organising a few years back by creating an NGO but our application was rejected by the Ministry of Social Affairs on the basis of the indecency law,” says Madian.

Gay activism has also become more challenging today due to the security situation prevailing in the region, worrying both activists and human rights organizations.

With Jordan home to thousands of Salafi Jihadists, it is directly concerned by possible rising numbers of home-grown members of the Islamic State. Members of the gay community fear that renewed insecurity could jeopardise their space in society.

“Nonetheless, members of the LGBT community are not alone in being concerned about Jihadist threats which also target secular people as well as religious minorities,” adds Coogle.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Indigenous and peasant women from every region in Bolivia at a demonstration in La Paz. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Feb 13 2014 (IPS)

Three years ago Bolivia passed a law to combat discrimination and racism, but no one has been convicted as a result, in spite of hundreds of legal complaints.

Rebeca Javier, a young journalist without distinguishing features, was assaulted and insulted by a man using racial slurs of the kind often used against indigenous people, while she interviewed people in the street in the southeastern city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

A few hours later, the man was free, in spite of the existence of filmed evidence and witnesses."There are no known prosecutions under the law that have led to prison sentences for these acts..." -- Verónica Sánchez, the secretary general of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights

“I asked the prosecutor for justice, but she did not listen to me,” Javier complained to IPS.

“There has not been a single sentence” because prosecutors and judges do not classify acts of discrimination as crimes, Leoncio Gutiérrez, the head of the governmental Fight against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination, told IPS.

“If there is a law, there should be a penalty,” Griselda Sillerico, the acting ombudsperson, told IPS. She condemned “the impunity” that continues to condone discrimination in this country of 10.3 million people, the majority of whom are indigenous, and where the president since 2006 has been Evo Morales, a native Aymara.

“Those in charge of prosecutions are not forceful and convincing, and justice cannot be permissive and tolerant,” she said. In her view, the problem resides in the system of administration of justice in Bolivia, a plurinational state under its 2009 constitution.

On Dec. 31, after holding him for eight hours, the prosecutor in the Javier case freed the aggressor, Víctor Hugo Soria, in spite of proof and witnesses’ testimony that he had hit Javier, spat on her and insulted her with phrases like “colla de mierda” (roughly translated it means “bloody Indian”) which are used against Aymara women by racist sectors in the west of the country.

Javier, a Spanish-speaking journalist for one of the foremost television channels in the region, described her feelings of impotence in the face of the prosecutor’s action, and said she had lodged a second legal complaint. Now the case is being investigated by a police department special victims unit.

In October 2010 Morales promulgated the Law Against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination, which was controversial from the outset because it included sanctions against the media if they disseminated “racist and discriminatory ideas,” with the penalty of a temporary ban for up to a year.

Promotors of the law, which was welcomed among the indigenous peoples, are now working three years later on its dissemination via social agencies, through eight departmental committees, the ombudsman’s office and the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, Gutiérrez said.

The law is intended to eliminate racist behaviour and all forms of discrimination, and to consolidate public policies for protection and prevention, according to Article 1.

Actions committed for racist motives are criminalised, as are discrimination, dissemination and incitement to racism or discrimination, participation in racist or discriminatory organisations or associations, and insults or other verbal aggression. Penalties can range from one to seven years of imprisonment.

In Sillerico’s view, the barriers to enforcing the law are related to the difficulty in dismantling a “colonial state” that is embedded in Bolivian society and is indifferent to the problem.

“It is remarkable that there are no known prosecutions under the law that have led to prison sentences for these acts, and three years later there is no progress evident in the judicial branch, which is in charge of enforcement,” Verónica Sánchez, the secretary general of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights in La Paz (APDHLP), told IPS.

Much the same happens with cases that come to international notice, like that of 10 teenage girls who applied to enrol in a private all boys’ school in the central city of Cochabamba in 2012.

Their request unleashed protests by the school’s staff, students and parents, in spite of a law in Bolivia prohibiting sex segregation in education, Julieta Montaño, head of the Legal Office for Women, an NGO, told IPS.

“The mothers of the boy students said they would not be responsible if the girls were raped,” said Montaño, who managed to have charges laid against eight leaders, parents and teachers who opposed the girls’ entry to the school.

The girls were eventually admitted after an agreement was reached, but the criminal case is proceeding at snail’s pace. “We are not seeking the maximum penalty; we just do not want the crime to go unpunished,” in order to send a message against gender discrimination, the lawyer said.

Between January and October 2013, the Vice-Ministry of Decolonisation accepted 135 complaints about racism or discrimination, most of them based on sexual orientation and educational level, and 57 percent of them arising in public agencies.

The ombudsman’s office received 1,652 complaints between 2010 and October 2013. The cases included older adults, people with disabilities, peasant farmers, coca growers, prison inmates, migrants, young people, pregnant women and others.

One example quoted by the ombudsman’s office is a xenophobic statement made by Isaac Ávalos, a senator for the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement Toward Socialism), in 2012. “Out of every 10 Colombians who come to Bolivia, eight are involved in illicit activities,” he said, as a justification of public insecurity.

Later he apologised for his words.

“I would not like to see anyone sent to prison because of discrimination, that would be the worst thing that could happen to us” as a society, Jorge Medina, an Afro-Bolivian congressman and the principal promotor of the law, told IPS.

“The law is not necessarily punitive, and its spirit is not to fill the prisons with those who discriminate,” said the MAS lawmaker.

Medina is in favour of conciliation methods by means of an apology from the aggressor, but he is concerned about the lack of follow-up in cases that should be resolved in the ordinary courts.

APDHLP’s Sánchez supports education on values and respect for differences with programmes for students. “It’s an issue of mental structure” that must be changed by training and policies, she said.

The case with the greatest repercussions to date has been the opening of a lawsuit against the Fides news agency and the newspapers El Diario and Página Siete. The government is accusing them of incitement to racism for alleged distortion in their reports on a speech by Morales on Aug. 15, 2012.

Batman, a familiar character in demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro, supports the “rolezinho” in front of Shopping Leblon with a placard reading “We are all equal.” Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 7 2014 (IPS)

They poured into shopping malls en masse to have some fun. But the reaction, a mixture of fear, admiration and heavy-handed repression, brought a new youth movement into being in Brazil: the “rolezinhos.”

In Brazilian youth slang, “rolar” means to go out with friends on a leisurely stroll, and the call to join these mass outings has become, in the view of some, a revolutionary movement, while for others it mirrors the consumerist longings of the emerging middle class.

It started in December 2013, when a group of young people used Facebook to plan a rolezinho (little outing) at a shopping centre in the southern city of São Paulo, “to have a bit of fun” in a country where entertainment and cultural events are expensive. Six thousand youngsters showed up. For social organisations and those on the left, rolezinhos express popular discontent or the fight against discrimination.

Police repression and the Brazilian government’s fears for the FIFA World Cup it will be hosting in June and July 2014 have only caused rolezinhos to spread to other cities.

“We came to prove that poor young people are consumers too,” Iata Anderson, a geography student, told IPS when a rolezinho took place Jan. 19 in front of the upmarket Shopping Leblon in Rio de Janeiro, leading to its preventive closure, in spite of the low numbers who came.

Anderson, like many other rolezinhos (a participant in a rolezinho is also called a rolezinho), is under 20. Although he lives in a “favela” (shanty town), he represents the new Brazilian middle class, who are studying at public universities and have access to the internet, credit and purchasing power, thanks to a decade of leftwing governments under former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and current president Dilma Rousseff.

“I came to support the rolezinhos in São Paulo, which are being met with tear gas and police beatings. This only happens because the participants are Afro-Brazilians from the periphery, who are seen as out of place in the luxurious sophistication of the shopping malls,” he said.

On Jan.11 militarised police used rubber bullets and pepper spray against some 1,000 young people engaged in a rolezinho at a shopping centre on the periphery of the city. There were 60 arrests.

The Brazilian Association of Shopping Centres (ABRASCE) says the malls are “democratic spaces catering to people of all social profiles and different ages” and that they “welcome diversity and social inclusion, frequently in areas with few entertainment options.”

They are also “meeting places for the majority of young people,” it said.

In the view of sociologist Ignacio Cano, of the Laboratory for the Analysis of Violence at the University of Rio de Janeiro, the police reaction “was disproportionate”, as was the closure of shopping centres in order to thwart rolezinhos.

This episode was “in contradiction to the historical tendency of shopping malls, which are temples of consumerism and now also entertainment centres, which increasingly attract ever more diverse people, whether or not they make purchases, and recently are also providing public services,” he told IPS.

Cano says it will be disappointing if shopping centres lose their “universalist” vocation and become “more elitist” instead.

However, for many people that is already the case.

“A dark-skinned person at a shopping centre is immediately targeted for close watching by the security staff, who think we are probably going to steal something,” cargo assistant Diego Meier told IPS, adding that he regards these malls as “palaces of the bourgeoisie and capitalism.”

“At times I am badly served by staff and I notice that it is dark-skinned Afro-Brazilians who work the security shifts or clean toilets. We must have the same rights, independently of skin colour, social class and purchasing power,” said Anderson, an Afro-Brazilian like Meier.

Rousseff herself criticised the harsh police response and prejudice against poor young people.

Minister for Racial Equality Policies Luiza Bairros said that rolezinhos were “peaceful demonstrations” and that black people should not automatically be associated with the idea of crime, as is customary.

“The problems arise when white people are afraid of young black people,” she said.

“The shopping centre is a novelty. We want to get to know a place that used to be only for the upper classes,” information technology student Waldei Teixeira told IPS.

Brazil’s middle and upper classes associate the presence of overwhelming numbers of poor black youngsters in public spaces like the beaches, with the danger of “dragnet” attacks by mobs of thieves.

But rolezinhos do not loot or steal or destroy.

“There are much larger crowds in the shopping malls during the Christmas shopping season. Is that a threat to the security of the shopping centre?” asked Anderson.

What started out as a collective way to have some fun evolved largely because of the way it was repressed, which “creates a political goal, because when young people feel challenged they try to overcome the prohibitions against them,” Cano said.

The upcoming world football championship and the presidential elections next October make the rolezinhos a political instrument, Fernando Gabeira, a journalist and former member of Congress for the Green Party (Partido Verde), told IPS.

“Small movements can grow into big movements, as happened in June 2013, with the outbreak of large protests against fare increases in public transport and corruption, and demands for better health care and education,” he said.

At first, the reason for the rolezinhos was “to democratise the space for whoever wanted to enjoy the beauty of the shopping centres,” said Gabeira. Now, in his view, everyone tags the phenomenon with “his or her own political and ideological aims.”

For social organisations and those on the left, rolezinhos express popular discontent or the fight against discrimination.

The government, on the other hand, views them as “an expression of dynamism, social mobility and the changes that have occurred in Brazilian society in recent years.”

This mobility is expressed in the consumerism of this new “niche market”, which paradoxically, is being catered to by the shopping centres themselves, consisting of a new middle class avid for cellular phones, computers, the latest televisions or stylish clothes.

In Gabeira’s view, rolezinhos are clamouring for their right to consume, as part of the consumer society.

The transformation from a social class that up until recently had no future, into another that has dreams, is expressed in the music that young people taking part in rolezinhos listen to at top volume in the shopping centres.

The lyrics and videos of “ostentation funk” proclaim that the road to happiness involves climbing the social ladder, marked by the possession of luxury goods and, afterwards, going out with blondes.

“This kind of funk was a preview of the rolezinho phenomenon. It shows a desire, conscious or unconscious, for social integration. But it’s also part of the culture,” film student Gonzalo Gaudenzi, who studied the history and origins of the genre, told IPS.

Brazilian funk (inspired by U.S. rap music) was born in the urban peripheries with lyrics on everyday topics such as drug trafficking, narcotics, police repression or sex.

But with the spread of social welfare, it began to reflect the aspirations of many of the 30 million people, in this country of nearly 200 million people, who were lifted out of poverty thanks to an economic model based on domestic consumption as the springboard for growth.

“If the music they listen to all day is telling them that to get the best girls and the highest social status they have to have the best cars, clothes and watches, even if they can’t buy them they will want to get close to that world and feel its presence. And where can they do that? At the shopping malls,” said Gaudenzi.

A lack of education and training condemn many street children in Bangladesh (and many other countries) to a life of poverty. Few are able to escape the cycle of low wages for unskilled work. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2013 (IPS)

With the richest one percent of the population now owning 40 percent of global assets, and the bottom half sharing just one percent, inequality is fast being recognised as a stubborn underlying obstacle to development.

In recent decades, despite steady economic growth, inequality has risen in most countries and in nearly every region of the world. It takes various forms, from income gaps to unequal political access. And it originates in a variety of factors, such as gender, ethnicity, disability, legal status, caste, skin colour, language and economic status.

Yoke Ling Chee of the Penang-based Third World Network (TWN) told IPS that the problem is worsening not only within the richest industrialised countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but also some developing countries with rapid economic growth.

Continuing structural inequities and flaws in the global trade and financial systems are a major cause, she said.

“The highly inadequate regulatory [and] policy responses to the last rounds of financial crises means that systemic weaknesses continue which make countries vulnerable to more financial instability,” she said.

Chee also said developing countries that have put in place financial reforms but are export-dependent found themselves equally vulnerable in the 2008 crisis and workers in export sectors suffered as a result.

According to a statement in May by a group of 17 U.N. human rights experts, inequality often triggers social problems that further marginalise groups already left behind and neglected, while unequal access to wealth allows runaway resource use by the wealthy, leading to environmental degradation and climate change, whose impacts fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable.

The group of U.N. experts pointed out that the rise in inequality has severely undermined the hard-won achievements of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It called for a post-2015 economic agenda that will include both a stand-alone and cross-cutting goals to eliminate inequalities.

An Open Working Group (OPW) of U.N. member states is scheduled to meet May 22-24, 2014 to discuss the contours of the proposed new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) which will succeed the current MDGs, whose target date is 2015.

The experts say making equality a cross‑cutting priority would mean every new goal will confront head-on the systemic injustices that drive inequalities – from institutional discrimination against minority groups to uneven investments in social services in different regions of a country.

They singled out social protection as “an indispensable part of the policy toolkit for tackling inequalities, to ensure that the post‑2015 agenda leaves no group, community or region behind.”

As many as 80 percent of families today have no access to social protection, despite clear evidence that social protection systems can contribute significantly to reducing poverty, creating social cohesion, realising human rights and protecting people from shocks such as food price spikes, the experts say.

They also say the post‑2015 agenda should be linked to the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) recommendation on social protection floors, which will help create a funding mechanism for developing countries.

The group includes Verene Sheperd, Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; Alfred de Zayas, independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order; Magdalena Sepulveda, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights; and Olivier De Schutter, Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

In an op-ed in the New York Times early this week, Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel Prize winning economist, said it is well-known by now that income and wealth inequality in most rich countries, especially the United States, have soared in recent decades and, tragically, worsened even more since the Great Recession.

But what about the rest of the world? he asked. Is the gap between countries narrowing, as rising economic powers like China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty? And within poor and middle-income countries, is inequality getting worse or better?

Roberto Bissio, director of Social Watch, told IPS the World Bank has also claimed that Goal One of the MDGs – reducing by half the proportion of people in extreme poverty – was met in 2010, five years in advance of the 2015 deadline. Yet that optimistic statistical conclusion in fact hides much more complex realities, he said.

Between 1990 (which is the starting date of Goal One) and 2010 total world exports multiplied almost five times, growing from a total value of 781 billion dollars in 1990 to 3.7 trillion dollars in 2010.

Over the same period, the world’s average inhabitant more than doubled his or her income: from 4,080 dollars a year in 1990 to 9,120 dollars in 2010. Yet that growth in trade and wealth is not reflected with a similar momentum in the evolution of social indicators.

TWN’s Chee told IPS a significant degree of investment profits and value‑added continue to be taken out of developing countries. Those countries that are food commodities exporters now face speculation as an added vulnerability.

Countries that depend on mining controlled by transnational corporations (TNCs) are characterised by environmental destruction, social problems and regressive tax structures for those industries.

“All these contribute to inequalities,” she argued.

“The austerity policies that many European governments now impose on their society that impact on the lower income, even the middle income, are a repeat of what developing countries have been suffering under conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for decades,” Chee said.

Women in Swaziland’s Ekwendzeni Chiefdom register to vote for the primary election. Analysts say that chauvinistic practices are being used to prevent women from participating in the Aug. 24 elections. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Aug 21 2013 (IPS)

Archaic and chauvinistic practices are being used to prevent Swazi women from taking part in the upcoming primary elections, despite the country having a constitution that guarantees their rights, says political analyst Dr. Sikelela Dlamini.

“The discrimination [against] women by preventing them from participating in politics is a consequence of deeply-rooted notions of male dominance and the subordination of women,” Dlamini told IPS.

He was reacting to a recent warning issued by the chief of Ludzibini, Prince Magudvulela, who told his subjects that they should not vote for women in mourning during the country’s Aug. 24 primary election.

It was clear during the meeting that Magudvulela was referring to former member of parliament and a contender for the Timphisini constituency, Jennifer Du Pont. She lost her husband, Bheki Shiba, in May and mourned him for a month instead of the normal two-year period. She is running for a second term of office.“Women don’t look good in pants and the chiefdom banned them from wearing pants." -- local headman, Zephaniah Dlamini

During an Aug. 17 meeting at the Ludzibini Royal Kraal in northern Swaziland, Magudvulela told his followers that according to customary practice, women in mourning were not allowed inside parliament, royal residences and near the King. Magudvulela said that electing women in mourning to parliament would be an embarrassment to the chiefdom.

Swaziland, a landlocked nation in southern Africa with a population of just over one million people, is ruled by a polygamist monarch, King Mswati III. Here political parties are not allowed to contest for power but individuals are elected to parliament from 55 constituencies know as “Tinkhundla”. The constituencies are sub-divided into 385 chiefdoms or districts nationwide. In the primary elections voters choose candidates from their chiefdoms who will then contest the secondary elections and compete against other candidates in their constituency for a seat in parliament.

“You must vote for someone that the King will be able to use,” Magudvulela had said.

Magudvulela told his followers that even though, according to the country’s constitution, Du Pont had a right to decide whether she followed the custom of mourning or not, customary law was still superior to the constitution.

Du Pont, who attended the meeting, was devastated by the chief’s conduct but said that she was still determined to win the elections.

“I’ll launch a complaint with the Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC),” she told IPS.

Local chiefs play a huge role in the election process here. Swaziland’s EBC gives them the responsibility to decide where in their local districts to hold the elections.

Since the election process began, some chiefs have told their subjects not to elect gay people or those who belong to political parties.

King Mswati III , when dissolving parliament on Aug. 2, told the nation to elect people that he would be “able to use”. It was a statement that has been criticised by the progressive movement.

“It might look like it is just advice from the authorities, but this was a way of telling people what to do,” head of department in theology and religious practices at the University of Swaziland (UNISWA), Nonhlanhla Vilakati, told IPS.

Du Pont was not the only woman to be discriminated against ahead of this election.

When Mana Mavimbela was nominated to run for a seat in parliament in the Lusabeni constituency, EBC presiding officer Lindiwe Sukati disqualified her because she was wearing pants.

“The presiding officer just asked the audience if a woman wearing pants [should] be allowed inside a cattle byre,” Mavimbela told IPS of the Aug. 4 incident. “When the people said ‘no’, she just moved on.”

She has since launched a complaint with the EBC.

“I was nominated and I haven’t done anything wrong in terms of the law that would have disqualified me,” Mavimbela said. She was the only woman out of four candidates nominated from her area.

Mavimbela was also summoned to appear before the Lusabeni chiefdom where local headman Zephaniah Dlamini said that it was unacceptable for women in the district to wear pants.

“Women don’t look good in pants and the chiefdom banned them from wearing pants,” Dlamini told local newspaper, Times of Swaziland.

Mavimbela said that she had apologised to the Royal Kraal council on Aug. 10, because she feared for her destitute family who live in rural Ncandvweni, in southern Swaziland.

But Vilakati said that the chiefs’ conduct was not surprising in a country where people are expected to live according to the public transcript.

“We have no gender policy in the country and people react in different ways depending on their living realities,” said Vilakati.

Women in rural areas tend to face more challenges with regards to customary practices compared to their urban counterparts, Vilakati noted.

While EBC chairperson Prince Gija condemned the violation of women’s rights on the basis of customary practices, he said he had no control over the chiefs.

“The chiefs are appointed by the King,” he told IPS. “The EBC can only advise them [about] civic education, but we have no power to reprimand them.”

Gija admitted, however, that chiefs play a big role in the Swazi elections.

However, giving chiefs the right to run the elections is an anomaly on its own, said UNISWA law lecturer, Maxine Langwenya.

“The EBC is abdicating its responsibility because the constitution is very clear that the EBC should run the elections,” Langwenya told IPS.

The Supreme Court of the United States. Credit: Mark Fischer/CC by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jun 25 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision, Section 4, of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 in a five to four ruling today, halting enforcement of Section 5 of the act.

One of the key achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, the act was intended to address historical, entrenched racial discrimination in voting policies and practises.

Even though black people in the United States have ostensibly possessed the right to vote since 1870, under the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, multiple federal civil rights acts were enacted in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965 to address discriminatory practises at state and local levels, including in elections.

Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito ruled to strike down the Section 4(b) of the 1965 act. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented.

Section 5 of the VRA of 1965 is one of the strongest enforcement provisions of the act. It requires that the U.S. Department of Justice pre-clear any changes to “any standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting”, including district maps, in any of the “covered jurisdictions”, which include all or part of 16 states in the United States, mainly in the South. Section 4 defines what areas Section 5 covers."Hubris is a fit word for today's demolition of the VRA."
-- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Equal sovereignty”

The case, Shelby County, Alabama v. Attorney General Robert Holder, argued that, on its face, the 2006 Congressional reauthorisation of sections of the act was unconstitutional because it was based on historical data of racial discrimination in election practises that are no longer relevant.

A majority of the court agreed with Shelby County, arguing there is a “fundamental principle of equal sovereignty” between states that requires the federal government to treat states equally.

Section 5, the court wrote, “requires States to beseech the Federal Government for permission to implement laws that they would otherwise have the right to enact and execute on their own. And despite the tradition of equal sovereignty, the Act applies to only nine States (and additional counties)”.

The court also ruled the criteria defined in Section 4 – a history of discriminatory practises, along with a low level of voter turnout – were antiquated and no longer justified by current conditions, because of the very success of the act.

Voter turnout and registration rates in covered jurisdictions “now approach parity”, the court wrote, and minorities hold elected office “at unprecedented levels”. It added that discriminatory practises like literacy tests have disappeared and that blatant discrimination is rare.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg blasted the majority opinion in her dissent, writing, “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA.”

“In the Court’s view, the very success of [Section] 5 of the Voting Rights Act demands its dormancy… Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” she wrote.

“The question this case presents is who decides whether, as currently operative, Section 5 remains justifiable, this Court, or a Congress charged with the obligation to enforce the post-Civil War Amendments ‘by appropriate legislation,'” she wrote.

Ginsburg noted an current, ongoing problem of a second generation of tactics designed to dilute black voting strength, including redistricting practises and a move to change some elections to at-large voting.

Ginsburg wrote that the Congressional record showed that covered jurisdictions were more likely to be the subject of prevailing discrimination complaints and that there was a procedure for covered jurisdictions to apply to be bailed out of Section 5, and for non-covered jurisdictions to be bailed in, if necessary.

Further, she argued that because Shelby County, the actual plaintiff in the case, clearly qualified for Section 5 coverage, that the court had overreached. “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decisionmaking.”

“Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today,” she wrote.

Fury from civil rights advocates

Voting rights and civil rights advocates are infuriated at the ruling and are scrambling to take action.

Some activists are urging Congress to enact a new Section 4 based on modern-day criteria to identify which states and other jurisdictions should require preclearance for any election-related changes

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) already has a petition on its website calling on Congress to act.

Justin Levitt, associate professor of law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, told IPS that such a move may be more complicated and politically challenging than it sounds.

“The court… certainly left the door open. If Congress chooses to return to ‘where’ question [where preclearance should be required], it would have to articulate a set of jurisdictions and the reason for including those and not others responsive to facts on the ground,” Levitt said. “That’s really hard to do.”

“It’s like asking Congress to try to figure out and come up with…current measures for places that are most sick even though they’re taking medicine. Now we’re taking the medicine away and now Congress needs to show it needs the medicine,” he said.

Possible new criteria that have been discussed so far include a history of other voting rights litigation under other provisions of the VRA, the degree to which an electorate is racially polarised or levels of prejudice, he said.

As for the court’s disregard for Congress’s renewal of the act in 2006, “there is not a tremendous amount of consistency in the amount of deference other branches of government get,” Levitt said.

Other activists are looking for a more radical and fundamental change. Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorofChange.org, said his organisation is pushing for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote.

“The right to vote is not enshrined in our Constitution. There’s a host of different requirements and laws, everything from registration to ballot access, in different states,” Robinson said.

“We can continue to be on the defensive, or we can sort of advance a new framework for how elections should be run in this country, and that’s what we’re doing here,” Robinson told IPS.

“We’ve got to be more aspirational,” he said. “We’ve got to think bigger.”

By Mathieu Vaas
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 20 2013 (IPS)

As the 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals approaches, different United Nations agencies are beginning to discuss what the post-2015 Development Agenda will encompass.

The United Nations (U.N.) entity for women, U.N. Women, has been tasked along with the United Nations Children’s Fund(UNICEF) to lead consultations on the topic of inequalities, which can be based on anything from gender and sexual orientation to race or socioeconomic status. Written submissions, e-discussions and an advisory group helped inform these discussions.

Saraswathi Menon, a senior manager at U.N. Women. Photo courtesy of U.N. Women.

The consultations discussed gender equality and gender-based violence, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people (LGBTI), persons with disabilities, economic inequalities, indigenous peoples, young people, urban inequalities and minorities.

IPS correspondent Mathieu Vaas spoke with Saraswathi Menon, a senior manager at U.N. Women, about the post-2015 Development Agenda and what possibilities it may offer to fight inequality around the world.

Q: How will the post-2015 Development Agenda differ from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)?

A: The success of the MDGs was in the way they captured the imagination of people around the world. We saw women’s organisations, civil society, media and academics using the MDGs to rate the performances of their leaders and the international community and in many cases hold them accountable.

Governments also rapidly absorbed the MDGs into their policies and priorities. Any new agenda must therefore respond to what people and governments have seen as the strengths and weaknesses of the previous framework.

In every country, rising inequalities and the impact of different crises – food, fuel, financial, economic employment – are concerns, and so is the violence against women that occurs in every country, in every income bracket, in homes and public spaces. The fragile lives of people in situations of conflict or in countries prone to natural disasters or vulnerable to climate change are also concerns.

These are only some of the issues that were not addressed in the MDGs and that need to be addressed in any new framework. Because we have seen the track record of the MDGs – with uneven progress on many, the worst case being maternal mortality – attention must be paid not just to the way the goals and targets are crafted but also in terms of how they have been translated into public action and made a difference in people’s lives.

The new framework will be different – it will respond to aspirations of people and lessons learnt by governments and their partners, and it will need to address challenges that have been aggravated or emerged in the years since the Millennium Declaration was adopted.

Q: U.N. Women has been tasked along with UNICEF to lead the consultations on inequalities. How will you reach out to women and youth?

A: The Inequalities Consultation has just ended, and it was wide-ranging, inclusive and open. Much of the discussion took place online in moderated discussions on 10 themes ranging from disabilities to indigenous peoples. Each discussion was jointly moderated by a U.N. agency and a civil society organisation.

We also put out a call for papers and received close to 200 papers. Through social media and by picking themes that resonated with people, we generated enormous interest. Over 4,600 people have registered and 34,500 individuals have visited the inequalities space since its launch.

The majority of those who participated were from civil society and developing countries. The majority of comments related to gender equality and women’s empowerment. So we are confident that we have received a wide cross section of views and that youth and that women have participated actively, since their concerns were specifically included.

Q: With some countries in the General Assembly refusing to discuss LGBTI rights, will those rights be part of the post-2015 agenda on inequalities?

A: In the inequalities consultation, one of our e-discussions was specifically on inequalities and LGBTI people. Key recommendations that emerged were to repeal all discriminatory laws and policies; enact comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation; include a commitment to address such discrimination in the post-2015 agenda; and to establish a U.N. human rights mechanism to monitor report on violence and discrimination against LGBTI people.

So the expectations are clear. Of course the final post-2015 framework will be determined through negotiations among governments. But expressing expectations is important and we hope that will influence the outcome.

Q: LGBTI youth are at special risk for homelessness, drugs, HIV/AIDS and other problems. Will these issues be dealt with?

A: The discussions around the post-2015 framework are looking specifically at poverty, urbanisation, including slums, health and HIV/AIDS in all their dimensions.  The vulnerability of specific groups and the overlapping discriminations that they face applies very specifically to LGBTI people.

In the inequalities consultation, we found that when different forms of inequality intersect, they reinforce each other and create unique forms of discrimination and exclusion. We also recommend that different inequalities cannot be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, and so all those issues – homelessness, drugs, HIV/AIDS – need to be tackled coherently.

Q: How do these kinds of international consultations help change the reality on the ground?

A: Setting global standards and goals is not only an inspiration but also a call for accountability. Goals are often aspirational but behind them lie the recognition that if mindsets change, if policies are improved, if people are empowered, there can be transformational change.

That is why we feel it is so important that the next round of goals and targets not only focus on averages like the MDGs, but actually reflect inequalities so that the measure of success is improvement in the lives of all and not just of a few.

The consultations told us that inequality affects not only the poorest or most deprived but diminishes communities, societies and the economy as a whole. So international consultations are important to express what the world prioritises, what people can use to hold leaders accountable, and to move us all, women and men, girls and boys, towards a better world.

Excerpt:

Life in the back alleys of the Degüi Ayoreo community, outside Santa Cruz. Credit: Miguel Ángel Souza/IPS

By Anna Infantas
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia , Dec 18 2012 (IPS)

No one knows exactly when they will show up, but when they do, it’s impossible not to notice them. In one of the busiest street markets in this bustling city in eastern Bolivia, a handful of members of the Ayoreo indigenous community periodically take over a portion of the sidewalk.

From that base of operations, Ayoreo women and children roam around, selling crafts or panhandling. “Buy my necklace, pretty blonde girl,” says an elderly Ayoreo woman, in broken Spanish, while a barefoot girl comes up saying “give me something.”

In Santa Cruz, a city of nearly three million people, the Ayoreo Indians have become an example of how urban sprawl can devour a culture, making it invisible and stigmatising and endangering it, said anthropologist Luca Citarella.

The Italian-born researcher stated in a study published this year that “in their process of urbanisation, the Ayoreo have become identified and stigmatised as street beggars, sex workers and slum dwellers.”

This can be seen in the Bolívar neighbourhood on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s economic capital and one of the fastest growing cities in Latin America, whose population has doubled in less than 20 years.

Bolívar contains one of the two urban slums inhabited by the Ayoreo, a historically nomadic group whose language, Zamuco, remains intact.

A block-long sign behind a wall announces the “Degüi Community”, where some 100 families live in 86 houses, most of them made of mud and cane.

An estimated 400 people live in this slum, the most populous of the 29 Ayoreo communities scattered over approximately 600 square km in the eastern department (province) of Santa Cruz, whose capital is Bolivia’s most cosmopolitan city.

“In the countryside there is no work, and we have no healthcare, so our only option is to come to the city,” the leader of the community, Isaac Chiqueno, told IPS.

The Ayoreo are one of the last native communities in Bolivia whose cultural fabric has been torn apart in the clash with mainstream society. Their sedentarisation process began less than 70 years ago.

Teresa Nominé, the first Ayoreo member of Congress, told IPS that “Life in the city is not like in our towns, because there is so much discrimination. We aren’t properly attended to in the hospitals, and in the schools, our children are shunned,” said the legislator, who added that her people were haunted by “bad luck.”

The ancestral home of the formerly nomadic Ayoreo was the northern part of Bolivia’s Chaco region. The Gran Chaco, the largest dry forest in South America, is shared by Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay.

There are an estimated 5,600 Ayoreo – a word that means “true people” in Zamuco – left in Bolivia and Paraguay.

Traditionally hunter-gatherers, their main activities in rural areas today are subsistence farming and forestry work, while in the cities they are employed mainly in the construction industry and as gardeners.

In both rural and urban areas, the women make, use and sell bags, necklaces and even clothing using the fibres of the garabata plant, which they gather in the forest.

The Ayoreo presence in the city is marked by a traumatic change in their way of life and social patterns. “Besides losing the foundations of the reproduction of their culture, they have been deprived of their dignity,” said Citarella.

Nominé concurred. “The cojñone (whites or mixed-race people) do not give us opportunities, and that changes our reality,” she said. “We come as fathers and mothers to improve our children’s quality of life. As indigenous people, we aren’t familiar with vices. But we come to the city and discover alcohol, drugs and prostitution…it’s our bad luck.”

Irene Roca, a sociologist, said discrimination was the main problem faced by the Ayoreo people living in the city.

“They are the most visible of the indigenous people living in Santa Cruz…The problem is that they are very visible, in a negative way,” she told IPS.

They are seen “as falling outside the acceptable limits of urban behaviour – as sources of crime, begging, sex work. They are depicted as a symbol of urban poverty,” said the expert, who holds a masters degree in ethnology from the social sciences faculty at the Sorbonne university in France.

She stressed that among the urbanised Ayoreo there are many who have tried to complete their secondary studies and get ahead. And she complained that these members of the community are the least visible and acknowledged face of the Ayoreo in the city, to which they have been forced to flock by the poor living conditions in their ancestral territory.

Chiqueno himself is an example. Just before his 50th birthday, he became one of the first eight Ayoreo students to graduate from secondary school, in 2011 at the Degüi school. This year, 15 more students graduated.

“It’s a sacrifice for us; and we need more Ayoreo teachers,” said Chiqueno, who excitedly talks about his next goal: to study political science at the university.

In his family, education comes first, said Chiqueno, a married father of five who hails from the village of Sapocó, some 300 km from Santa Cruz. He tells his children that the only way to get ahead in life is by studying.

Luisa, one of his daughters, is studying social work at the university, and runs the child care centre in Degüi. “Some kids listen to what their parents say,” he said, with evident pride.

Besides education, another of the chief problems faced by the Ayoreo is access to health services.

“In the hospitals, they forget we’re human beings; we only want to be treated with dignity,” said Nominé, who came to Santa Cruz five years ago from the Ayoreo village of Puesto Paz.

In the Ayoreo communities, children still die from diarrhoea and women die in childbirth, while community members who go to the hospital in critical condition have to wait “until someone feels like assisting them,” says a report by the non-governmental organisation Apoyo al Campesino-Indígena del Oriente Boliviano (support for indigenous campesinos – small farmers – in eastern Bolivia).

The report, published in May, studied the conditions faced by the just over 2,700 Ayoreo living in Bolivia.

Many of the problems in access to healthcare are directly related to discrimination and the lack of inclusive policies in public health, the experts said.

It is precisely to seek out healthcare that many Ayoreo leave their rural communities, to become “invisible” urban Indians, said Roca, the sociologist and ethnologist.

Yomara receives tutoring in the Portada Alta school in Málaga, Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Dec 11 2012 (IPS)

Daniel introduces himself as a “gypsy and guitarist,” Francisco José wants to become a doctor, Yomara timidly says she likes to cook, and María has no idea what she wants to study.

The 12 to 17-year-old students at this school in the southern Spanish city of Málaga belong to the Roma or gypsy community, which is marked by high dropout and truancy rates.

Despite “noteworthy progress” in educational coverage among this ethnic group in the last 30 years, only 20 percent of youngsters who start secondary school – the first four years of which are compulsory, from ages 12 to 16 – go on to graduate, Humberto García, with the Gypsy Secretariat Foundation (FSG), told IPS.

And he added that not all Roma children enrol in secondary school.

The Council of Europe estimates that the Roma number 725,000 in Spain – 1.57 percent of the population of 46 million.

Although members of this ethic group can be found in every trade and profession, many work as street vendors in markets or as waste pickers of scrap metal and cardboard, which they sell for recycling.

“I didn’t go to high school and I don’t want my kids to be like me; I want them to be able to relate to others and become something in life,” 44-year-old Antonia Martín told IPS.

She is the mother of Yomara (16), José (15) and Jesús (24). She also has a two-year-old grandson.

At her side, her husband Antonio Campos, whose parents were basket-makers and who has worked at a golf course on the Málaga coast since he was 17, says “the gypsy mentality has to change. They think they have to live like our grandparents did. But today there are more opportunities, and we can live better, with more education, and receiving more respect.

“Being a waste picker, junk collector or street vendor is not a good life – it’s feast today, famine tomorrow,” said Campos, who called for “breaking down the barriers” imposed by the traditional lifestyle of Spain’s gypsies, or calós.

Caló is the language of Spain’s gypsies, who gradually lost their Romani language. It is also another name for the Roma community in this country.

In Spain, the term gitano or gypsy is not considered derogatory, although that does not mean that this country is free of the discrimination suffered by the Roma, Europe’s largest ethnic minority.

Until the end of General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in 1975 and the adoption of a new constitution in 1978, the Roma people did not have the same rights as the rest of the population.

But since then, school enrolment has climbed from extremely low levels to 93 percent today.

“Education and employment are two essential factors for the integration of the gypsy community,” said the FSG’s García, whose Promociona (Promote) programme works with students, families and schools to lower dropout and repetition rates.

The programme is active in 300 schools in 27 towns and cities around Spain. In Málaga the programme has a staff of four women who work with around 50 students and their families and teachers.

The four workers arrange home visits with the parents and tutoring workshops in the classroom, like the one that brings together Daniel, Yomara, María, Francisco José and other students in the Portada Alta school in Málaga every Tuesday.

“We are focused on fighting truancy and getting the families involved, because they don’t see the importance of education,” biology teacher Isabel Passas, from the Guadalmedina school, where 80 percent of the students are Roma, told IPS.

Passas lamented that a majority of the girls drop out by the age of 14, when they are married off in arranged marriages and start having children of their own.

Martín doesn’t want her 16-year-old daughter Yomara to get married yet. “I won’t let her get married so young, and she doesn’t want to either. It’s really backwards to get married and have children so young; there’s time enough for that,” she said.

When she was little, Martín, who comes from a family of 10 children, used to help her mother sell fruit and clothing on the streets.

Many parents depend on their children’s help in street vending, and pull them out of school early, the vice principal of the Portada Alta school, María Victoria Toscazo, told IPS.

The economic crisis that is rocking Spain has also hurt the traditional open-air markets.

According to Campos, who has relatives who work as market vendors, “people are hardly selling anything, and competition (from immigrants) is really tough.”

The study “Gypsy population, employment and social inclusion”, published this year by the FSG, reported that unemployment among the Roma in Spain grew nearly threefold between 2005 and 2011, to 36.4 percent.

And while unemployment among the Roma was five percentage points above the overall unemployment rate in 2005, today the difference is 14 percentage points.

“The crisis has affected everyone, but it has had a more severe impact on the most vulnerable,” said García.

Moreover, “society still has a really negative view of us, and social rejection is strong,” he added.

It is hard to encourage Roma youngsters to continue studying when they are aware that discrimination will likely make it difficult for them to find a job.

Language and literature teacher Antonio Blanco, who has spent four years teaching Roma children at the Guadalmedina school, stressed the importance of forging emotional ties and creating a pleasant environment, to keep children in school.

Nevertheless, the Roma in Spain are better off than in the rest of the European Union.

“There are problems, but not as many as in France, Romania or Portugal,” a source at the FSG told IPS.

Like the rest of the population, Spain’s Roma people are covered by the universal public healthcare system and have access to affordable housing programmes for low-income families.

Most Roma live in working-class neighbourhoods, and only a small proportion actually live in slums. But the stereotype of the wandering, thieving gypsy lingers.

The question is how far to integrate in a society that discriminates against them. Martín’s relatives say she and her family are “apayaos” (roughly meaning assimilated to the “payo” or non-gypsy culture).

Her husband argues that “gypsies should not be all bunched together, but spread around, to adapt to another way of life.”

Posting billboards with misleading information about voter fraud is one of many voter suppression tactics. Above, a billboard in Massachusetts. Credit: amelia.louise/CC by 2.0

By IPS Correspondent
ATLANTA, Georgia, Nov 5 2012 (IPS)

Voter suppression has reached new heights in the United States, analysts and experts say, as elected state officials have increasingly resorted to a new and growing generation of voter suppression tactics.

Whether these tactics will tip the outcome of the presidential race is uncertain, but they are likely to affect races at least at state and local levels during elections on Nov. 6.

Although no U.S. citizen can technically be deprived of his or her right to vote due to race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, the majority of these tactics, driven in part by groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, appear to be directed at black and low-income communities, as they have a disproportionate negative impact on voters in those communities.

“They’re trying to stop certain people from voting – communities of color, poor white people as well. People of less socioeconomic status, generally the elderly, students,” Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, told IPS. “Those people are typically those who would be more disenfranchised.”

Butler said she thought the state of Georgia had served as “the testing ground for everywhere else”, adding, “I would say it’s gotten more intense.”

While poll taxes and literacy tests that were prevalent in the Jim Crow Era prior to the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act are long gone, officials – primarily Republicans – in state legislatures across the country have ushered in a new wave of suppression tactics.

Contemporary voter suppression tactics include more restrictive voter identification laws, voter purging, reinstating tougher felon disenfranchisement laws, restricting early voting, voter intimidation and misinformation tactics.

“I believe, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, they believe in stopping the vote for fear of people they have to contend with. They feel they can have a better chance of winning if there’s less people participating.  If more people are participating, there’s more of a chance because of their stance of issues, that they won’t get elected,” Butler said.

Voter ID laws

The southern state of Georgia is ground zero for voter identification laws. In 2006, Georgia was the first state to reduce the number of eligible forms of identification (ID) that voters can use to vote, from 17 to five.

Georgia’s law was approved under President George W. Bush by the U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ), which can block election laws in states that have a history of racial discrimination.

Since then, eight more states have enacted extremely strict voter ID laws, including Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, according to a report by the Advancement Project.

The general trend of these laws is to require an unexpired government-issued ID in order to vote. Previously acceptable IDs in those states that have been eliminated include veterans’ ID cards, utility bills, student IDs issued by private universities, social security cards, and out-of-state and expired state IDs.

These more restrictive laws are currently in effect in five of those states – Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee – while others have not withstood the scrutiny of the courts or the USDOJ.

Last month, a judge ruled that Pennsylvania’s law could not go into effect for the Nov. 6 election. Officials there, however, have continued to run misleading ads suggesting otherwise.

South Carolina’s 2011 photo voter ID law, on the other hand, became the first election law to be blocked by the USDOJ in nearly twenty years, under administration of President Barack Obama. Texas’s law also was blocked by the USDOJ under Obama.  Both laws are now the subjects of ongoing litigation.

Meanwhile, Mississippi’s law has not yet been ruled upon by the USDOJ; and in Wisconsin the law has been enjoined by the courts but is still on appeal.

According to Butler, voter ID restrictions also have a special impact on rural voters. Butler raised concerns about low-income people in rural Georgia who don’t drive, “who would have to pay someone to take them to get documents they need and get photo ID”.

Because of the costs associated with obtaining these IDs, Butler called voter ID laws a “poll tax”, adding, “I think it’s a new Jim Crow”.

A plethora of tactics

States have employed many different methods in attempting to purge citizens from the ballot.

Some remove voters from the rolls if they haven’t voted in a certain number of years; if there is a discrepancy involving the state’s information regarding a particular voter in different state databases; if the voter is not believed to be a U.S. citizen but actually is; if the voter is believed to be a disenfranchised felon but actually is not; or if mail sent to the voter’s address is returned by the post office.

Meanwhile, in the last two years, Florida and Iowa have reversed executive orders issued by previous governors and made it more difficult again for ex-felons to regain their voting rights.

“In Iowa, in 2005, Governor Vilsack issued an executive order that automatically reinstated voting rights for all ex-offenders in the state. Prior to that, Iowa was a permanent disenfranchisement state; the only way around that was a gubernatorial pardon,” Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, told IPS.

80,000 voters were reinstated in Iowa “in a stroke of a pen”, Mauer said.

But in 2011, a Republican governor was elected, and in his first month of office issued an executive order overturning the policy, Mauer said, noting that the 80,000 remained reinstated.

Similarly, in Florida in 2007, Governor Charlie Crist, a moderate Republican, changed the rules of what is called “executive clemency” to make it easier, in some cases nearly automatic, for ex-felons to regain their voting rights. As a result, 130,000 people regained the right to vote.

But in 2011, the new Governor, Rick Scott, a right-wing Republican, reversed the policy.

Mauer says other states have not done the same. “I think it’s more a quirky bump than a national trend,” he said.

Restriction and intimidation

At least five states have restricted early voting, including Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia.

In Georgia, for example, the legislature reduced early voting from 45 days to 21. “The Georgia Legislature changed it because too many people weren’t discouraged,” Butler said.

Florida has also restricted the number of days of early voting from 14 to eight, including eliminating voting on the Sunday before the election, when black churches have traditionally mobilised members to vote in an event known as Souls to the Polls.

Butler also told IPS of voter intimidation tactics going on in Georgia.

“In Savannah, this organisation True the Vote has been telling voters in line that if you hadn’t voted since 2008, you are not eligible to vote, giving out erroneous information,” Butler said. In Georgia, one would have had to not voted since 2004 to now be off the rolls.

“Those things are there because of voter suppression. Some people [in Savannah] got upset and left because they thought these people knew what they were talking about,” Butler said.

“True the Vote has challenged some people at the Atlanta University Centre and saying they couldn’t vote because they were students and were out-of state,” Butler said.

True the Vote, which has trained and dispatched “elections observers” in at least twenty states, claims that concerns about voter fraud – that is, voters illegally voting – motivate their tactics. Indeed, elected officials have cited voter fraud as the reason they have passed voter ID laws.

However, a study by News 21, a reporting project of Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, examined public records and found that, only ten cases of in-person voter fraud have been reported in over the last decade, and that none have been substantiated.

In Ohio, a crucial swing state in the Presidential Election, at least ten billboards warning potential voters that “VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY!  3 ½ YEARS AND $10,000 FINE,” have appeared in Democratic-leaning Cleveland.