LGBT activists, human rights observers and police officers wait outside a courtroom in Uganda's constitutional court on Jun 25, 2012. Four activists had brought a case against Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo. Credit: Will Boase/IPS

By Julia Hotz
WASHINGTON, Jul 31 2014 (IPS)

As the White House prepares to host more than 40 African heads of state for the upcoming U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, civil society actors from the U.S., Africa and the international community are urging the Barack Obama administration to use the summit as an opportunity to more thoroughly address some of Africa’s most pressing human rights violations.

“While President Obama has unveiled specific initiatives to strengthen U.S. development work on the continent and connect it to core national security objectives, he has not done the same for human rights and the rule of law,” Sarah Margon, Washington director of Human Rights Watch,  said in the group’s 2014 Human Rights in Africa report.“Evangelical extremists from the U.S. have contributed to making society more dangerous than it ever was before." -- Richard Lusimbo

Although the policy agenda for next week’s summit has received praise for its proactive stance on energy, security and economic development, human rights advocates from both Africa and the U.S. are specifically condemning the agenda’s lack of concern over two critical humanitarian issues: freedom of expression and rights for the LGBT community.

“On the two issues we’re discussing today, the administration should be more straightforward, open and critical about these issues occurring in many countries in Africa,” Santiago A. Canton, director of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights, an advocacy group here, told IPS.

Canton spoke Wednesday about these issues alongside fellow human rights advocates, as well as African journalists and LGBT activists, who collectively agreed that the current state of both press freedom and LGBT equality across Africa is “unacceptable.”

“Right that leads to other rights”

Citing terrorism laws, access to funding, and discrimination against independent media  as some of Africa’s  main obstacles to free expression, Wednesday’s panel spoke first and foremost about the need for press freedom to be recognised as not only a human right, but also as a key factor in development.

“This is a right that leads to other rights,” Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, said Wednesday.

Within his plea for governments to take a more active stance on freedom of expression and provide for more internet access, La Rue stated that 90 percent of young men in rural Africa already know how to use the internet, while 90 percent of rural women, who tend to be forbidden from the cyber cafes where such knowledge circulates, do not.

“If not everyone is convinced that freedom of expression and access to technologies are important development goals, then we cannot talk about things like education and access to health, especially women’s health…we need to first allow access to information,” he said.

In addition to urging that such freedoms be integrated into the next set of Sustainable Development Goals, La Rue has requested that the U.N. hire more legal and communications personnel to defend freedom of expression, adding that the understaffed office receives up to 25 cases per day.

Yet for Wael Abbas, a prominent Egyptian journalist, blogger and human rights activist, the blame rests primarily on the U.S. government alone.

“Egypt is the biggest country that receives U.S. aid – some in military, some in development – but if Egypt is  a dictatorship, and there is no regulation of how this money is being spent, than the U.S. is just bribing a corrupt regime and dumping huge amounts of money into the ocean,” Abbas told IPS.

Explaining how the Egyptian state is “waging a war against [independent journalists] and trying to destroy [their] credibility and presence,” Abbas argues that independent journalists like himself, who show “what is really going on in Egypt,” need assistance and attention paid to the fact that most media outlets are owned by corrupt businessmen.

Arthur Gwagwa, a Zimbabwean human rights defender and freedom of expression advocate, agrees that the U.S. should take more initiative in protecting freedom of expression and ensuring governmental compliance in Africa, informing IPS of a set of policy recommendations to address at next week’s summit.

A fundamental, not special, human right

Related to this call for a greater focus on freedom of expression in the press is the need for a more active U.S. role in protecting Africans’ freedom of sexual expression and identity.

“This is a time that we have to think about how we’re addressing sexual minorities’ rights overseas,” Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, said in Wednesday’s discussion.

Citing Africa’s passage of an anti-gay law and the recent comment by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni that “gays are disgusting,” Kennedy expressed disappointment that there has been “no real pushback” from the U.S. on LGBT rights in Africa. She said a concerted U.S. effort “could have helped a lot,” and that there are now many LGBT individuals in Africa who are afraid to attend HIV clinics for treatment.

Tom Malinowski, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour, considers such discrimination to be ironic on a continent that is diverse as Africa.

He spoke of the challenges posed by authoritarian leaders, both in Africa and around the world, who have called LGBT equality part of a “Western sexual agenda,” and believes it is extremely important for not only governments, but also artists, celebrities and business leaders, to challenge such a characterisation.

“This is a fundamental human right, not a special human right…everyone has the right to not be persecuted for who we are as human beings,” Malinowski said.

Lip service?

In addition to Kennedy’s suggestion that the U.S. pass legislation to create a special envoy for LGBT rights, Malinowski is calling on his government to provide “direct assistance” to people, such as doctors and lawyers, who serve on “the front line of the struggle,” and to continue to put LGBT equality “front and centre” in its diplomatic engagements.

Yet HRW’s Sarah Margon warns that the U.S. has sent “mixed signals” on this issue, and suggests that that the U.S. government is “simply paying lip service to human rights.”

Indeed, Richard Lusimbo, representative of Sexual Minorities Uganda, has similarly urged the U.S. to speak out more strongly, calling on Washington to “hold homophobic people responsible” for the subsequent discrimination in Africa.

“Evangelical extremists from the U.S. have contributed to making society more dangerous than it ever was before…and because we have no opportunities to go to radio and TV to show our side of the story, it makes things very difficult,” he noted.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at hotzj@union.edu

Ragia Omran. Credit: Lilian Wagdy/cc by 2.0

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jul 3 2013 (IPS)

A prominent human rights organisation based here announced Tuesday that its annual award for 2013 would go to Ragia Omran, an Egyptian lawyer and women’s rights activist.

“With dedication and courage, Ms. Omran is often the first to arrive on the scene at jails, police stations, court houses, and military and civilian prosecution offices,” said Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, which has presented the award to outstanding defenders and advocates of human rights for 30 years.“She is doing critical work in a country and a region that is going through a very difficult and important time." -- RFK's Santiago Canton

“Hundreds of peaceful activists have her to thank for successfully securing their release and protecting their rights to freedom of speech and association. [Omran] is a beacon of hope for the women of Egypt and a champion in the global human rights movement.”

The award, according to the centre, is designated for “journalists, authors, and human rights activists who, often at great personal risk and sacrifice, are on the frontlines of the international movement for human rights and social justice.”

Picked by the RFK Center from a list of over 100 nominees, Omran has spent two decades fighting for women’s rights, as well as human rights in general, in Egypt. In 1994, she started and led a successful campaign to stop the practice of female genital mutilation in public hospitals.

Most recently, she played a part in the popular uprisings in Egypt, founding an influential campaign to further human rights there. Her Almasry Alhurr Movement seeks to promote long-term good governance, transparency and public participation.

Other groups that promote human rights have also acknowledged the merit of Omran’s work, especially noting her recent accomplishments.

“She has done really good work, especially since 2011,” Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, told IPS. “In particular, she has been very engaged in defending protestors in military trials.”

As an attorney, Omran has represented hundreds of protestors facing military tribunals, defending their rights to demonstrate publicly against government repression. She is also a part of the Front to Defend Egypt Protesters, a legal network designed to protect activists, and the New Woman Foundation, which advocates reproductive rights and the inclusion of women in politics.

In addition, she’s a member of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, which represents torture victims and others who have suffered mistreatment at the hands of the government, and the No to Military Trials for Civilians Campaign, an effort to halt the subjection of civilians to military trials.

The RFK Center stated in its announcement that “[t]he work of human rights activists remains critical during this time of political unrest [in Egypt].”

Shield of recognition

In an interview with IPS, Santiago Canton, director of the centre’s human rights programme, reiterated the importance of geography in selecting Omran for the award.

“She is doing critical work in a country and a region that is going through a very difficult and important time,” he noted.

Egypt is currently in a state of great social and political unrest, with its military having given President Mohammad Morsi an ultimatum, which ends Wednesday, to gain control of a political situation that has never stabilised following last year’s elections.

What the military will do if the president fails to meet this demand remains unclear, but the ultimatum underscores the lack of democratic stability and degree of military control that still exists in Egypt.

Women’s rights have been a central component of Egypt’s secular, democratic movement. The sexual abuse of women protesting in Egypt has also drawn attention to the issue of gender within the pro-democracy movement there.

The RFK Center has a well-established reputation for maintaining material and political support for its awardees for many years after the honour is received. Omran will receive an undisclosed amount of money as part of the award, but Canton points out that she will benefit from it in other ways.

For instance, the centre will commit to assisting Omran in achieving her goals by advocating on her behalf and providing her with needed resources. In addition, the attention the award draws, Canton believes, will act as a shield against threats from the sources of power that are challenged by her work.

“The award provides recognition that will in turn provide added protection for her as she continues to do this outstanding work at her own risk,” Canton told IPS, citing examples from the history of the award where this has proven to be the case.

He notes, for instance, stories of past awardees, such as Zbigniew Bujak and Adam Michnik, leaders of a Polish underground movement being persecuted by secret police, and Amilcar Mendez Urizar, a Guatemalan activist whose work earned him death threats from powerful people.

The award will be presented to Omran by the widow of former U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, for whom the award is named, during a ceremony here in November.

Dolores Huerta and Librada Paz (right) in 2004. Courtesy of Librada Paz.

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 15 2012 (IPS)

A widely respected advocate for U.S. farmworker rights received a prestigious award on Capitol Hill here Wednesday, using the occasion to highlight pending state legislation that could significantly improve lives and working conditions that some have likened to modern-day slavery.

Librada Paz originally came to the United States from Oaxaca, Mexico, when she was 15 years old, planning on studying for an engineering degree. Instead, for the next decade she ended up working on fruit and vegetable farms in New York State, where she learned of the “enormous discrimination” and “inhuman conditions” that continue to mark the lives of the state’s farmworkers.

“In the fields, you do not matter – neither your security, nor your thoughts, nor your dignity,” she told those gathered at a U.S. Senate office building, where she received this year’s Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

“While all workers suffer enormous discrimination, this is multiplied particularly for women. This is what it means when the legal system allows abuse – when justice has no meaning.”

In the United States, nearly 75 percent of farm labourers are Hispanic, more than half of whom are thought to be undocumented. While working conditions for farmworkers throughout the country remain difficult, those in New York State have long been particularly, and often cruelly, marginalised.

That’s because of state legislation, passed in 1932, that codified into law systematic discrimination against farmworkers in New York, even as other states eventually moved to extend protections to farm labour.

Now a leader with the Rural Migrant Ministry, a three-decade-old NGO focusing on farmworker rights in New York, Paz and others are currently ramping up agitation in support of state legislation that would do much to bring New York’s regulations on the issue in line with national and international standards. The bill, the Farmworker Fair Labor Practices Act (FFLPA), is scheduled to be debated early next year.

Unfinished rights battle

Currently, New York farmworkers are unable to engage in collective bargaining, while also lacking many of the labour protections that have become nearly universal in other sectors and states. Farm labourers do not receive overtime pay and often work for little over three dollars an hour, with child labour reportedly rampant.

According to Kerry Kennedy, Robert Kennedy’s daughter, many farmworkers in the state are forced to work 95-hour workweeks, often around the clock; live in miniscule, overcrowded group housing; and go years without receiving time off. On Wednesday, she reported that of two dozen women farmworkers with whom she spoke recently, each reported having suffered sexual assaults from employers.

If passed, the FFLPA would make it easier for women to pursue such charges against their employers. In addition, the bill would ensure that New York farmworkers receive the same minimum labour guarantees enjoyed by other workers in the state, enforcing a minimum wage, worktime caps and overtime assurances, and worker compensation and disability insurance.

“Farmworkers never received the rights most others received, and to this day they continue to be perceived as little more than chattel, thought of as ‘barely human’,” Kerry Kennedy said. “Drudgery, subjugation and humiliation are, today, what characterises the conditions for those who grow food for the people of this country.”

Kennedy says that the legal peculiarities that perpetuate the marginalisation of New York’s 60,000-odd farmworkers contravene international rights standards. She also notes that even as unemployment figures have skyrocketed in recent years in the United States, few within the mainstream have chosen to engage in readily available farmwork – because they realise that it’s next to impossible to make a living.

“Jim Crow conditions continue to live on in New York farms,” Kennedy said, referring to the systemic segregation that openly and legally marginalised African Americans for decades in large parts of the country. “This situation constitutes an unfinished battle for civil rights in this country.”

50-year anniversary

Now in its 29th year, the Robert F. Kennedy award is named after the assassinated former U.S. attorney general and brother of President John F. Kennedy, and over the decades it has recognised human rights defenders from 26 countries. In addition to his daughter, Robert Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, was in Washington on Wednesday to confer the award on Paz, the third laureate from the United States.

Farmworker rights was a central focus of Robert Kennedy’s advocacy work. The week before his 1968 assassination, Kennedy met with a hunger-striking Cesar Chavez, the California labour leader who has had the single most significant impact on Hispanic and farmworker rights in the United States.

Chavez funnelled much of his organising work through an organisation called the United Farm Workers, which he co-founded 50 years ago, in 1962, along with social activist Dolores Huerta. Librada Paz is often compared with both Chavez and Huerta, and the latter’s time is currently focused on raising support for the FFLPA, the New York legislation.

“Many people think of New York City as the intellectual soul of the United States, but the fact that farmworkers in that state still have no human rights – that’s a disgrace,” Huerta said here on Wednesday.

“This legislation is not asking for a lot, just for respect and dignity, but it is long overdue – those who feed us shouldn’t be treated like slaves. Workers in New York need to have this legislation passed to give them some level of protection, which would be a big first step.”

Huerta added that the FFLPA bill is “very close to passing, and if we all work together we can make it happen.”

New York State legislators up in Albany are likely to be seeing a lot of Librada Paz in the near future.

Librada Paz in the winter of 1990, when she worked trimming apple trees about two years after arriving in the United States. Credit: Courtesy of Librada Paz

The farmworkers’ rights activist was recently chosen as the 29th recipient of the annual RFK Human Rights Award, marking the beginning of a six-year partnership between Paz and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights to further her advocacy for just working conditions for farmworkers and the recognition of additional exploitation women face in the fields daily.

“The judges were extremely impressed with her, and excited about the possibility of making a difference with our support,” Santiago Canton, director for the Human Rights Program of the Washington D.C.-based RFK Center, told IPS.

The future partnership with Paz and her organisation, Rural Migrant Ministry (RMM), will include financial support and human resources for advocacy campaigns to get farm workers equal protection under New York State’s Labor Relations Act.

Currently, farm labour is excluded from this law – which grants other New York State workers such rights as a day of rest, sick leave, paid overtime and collective bargaining – leaving it up to farmers to decide whether or not to extend such rights.

“I’m very excited about this partnership,” Librada Paz told IPS. “RMM needs a strong partnership like this in order for us to really help out. I think it’s going to be really powerful.”

Paz migrated from Mexico to the U.S. at age 15, along with her sister, where she joined her two brothers working 14-hour days on farms in Florida, California and New York. For the next 15 years, she experienced first hand many of the conditions she today addresses in her work for RMM, a non-secterian organisation educating and advocating for farmworkers across New York state.

Having obtained a college degree and her citizenship, Paz quit the fields in 1998 and has since poured her energy into lobbying for such initiatives as the Farm Workers Fair Labor Practices Act – a bill that has won the backing of other civil society organisations, like the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

She’s eager to stress that “not all farmers are bad”, but that protections ought to be in place for those workers who are currently being exploited by the rotten apples in the industry.

“People are being fired because they get sick. And people get sick because they don’t get a day of rest,” she said.

Her organisation further seeks overtime pay for work “above 50 or 60 hours a week”, which is a standard workweek for farmworkers, according to Paz.

One of the biggest obstacles her organisation faces in its lobbying efforts at the state level, she said, is politicians’ disbelief that workers’ rights are violated to the extent they are. When it comes down to it, “It’s always their word against the farmers’.”

In addition to across-the-board farm labour conditions, which Canton calls “horrendous” and “anachronistic” in most of the U.S., women face additional discrimination, ranging from difficulties securing farm work to endemic sexual abuse.

“When I first came here, we would go to farmers and they would say ‘we’re not hiring women, we’d never ever hire women’,” the now 39-year old remembers of her early experiences finding work. “Now it’s more open, but it’s still not as easy as for men.”

Once she did find employment, the living conditions were tough for women. “People want to take advantage of you. We sleep with men and women in one room. And you know what men do when there aren’t many women around.”

Paz, who has been active in the farmworkers movement since high school but who didn’t become politicised as a woman activist farmworker until about 10 years ago, sees a similar trajectory reflected in other women. “Maybe it’s me paying more attention now, but even just 10 years ago, women were much less visible in the movement that they are now.”

She remembers attending a conference on sexual violence against women farmworkers around that time as one of the first instances that women around her banded together for their rights. “Women have become more active and are participating in events, and working to empower other women.”

Paz’s award closely follows the recognition of another farmworker rights activist, Dolores Huerta – cofounder of the United Farmworkers with Cezar Chavez – who received the Medal of Honor from U.S. President Barack Obama in May.

Both choices mark a strong recognition of women’s involvement in the fight for equal labour rights of farmworkers and the additional discrimination they encounter.

The RFK Center, which announced the decision last week, chose Paz out of 34 nominees to enter into a partnership. The centre will provide up to 30,000 dollars in financial assistance and one staff person at the centre who will fully dedicate their time to working with the award winner on a strategy they design and execute over the next six years, according to Canton.

“This doesn’t mean after six years we’re gone,” he stressed. “The idea of the award is to help those individuals and those organisations that are working towards social justice to make a difference in the world of millions of people. If after six years we still consider this work relevant enough to continue, we will continue to support her.”

In recent years, the Robert F. Kennedy Center has recognised and supported the work of Ugandan LGBTQI-activist Frank Mugisha and Mexican advocate for indigenous rights Abel Barrera Hernández, among others.

Paz admits she wasn’t aware quite how big of a deal the award was until she won it and did some research.

“I did not know how powerful they (the RFK Center) are. When I realised it, I thought, ‘Wow, this is really incredible.’”

With the help of the RFK Center, she’ll be knocking on some more doors in the state capitol, Albany, soon, she assured IPS. After all, she knows her way well there. “I’ve been around and around to Albany,” she says, laughing, “And I never give up.”

The award will officially be handed to Librada Paz during a ceremony in Washington D.C. in November.