Policy advocacy and partnerships for children's rights
Legislative Reform Initiative

Harmonizing National Legislation with International Human Rights Instruments

While virtually every country in the world has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), children's rights are frequently not realised. One important aspect of creating an environment within which children's rights will be realised is the creation of an appropriate legislative framework which enshrines their rights. While this is not sufficient to guarantee their rights, and implementation of the law remains a major challenge around the world, getting laws and the mechanisms and institutions for their implementation right is one of the most essential steps to realising children's rights.

Overview and abstracts from UNESCO's upoming publication: The Fourth Wave

Introduction

The HIV and AIDS pandemic is both fuelling and being fuelled by inequalities across gender, race, ethnicity, class and age. e patterns of impact vary across different settings and regions of the world and are also shaped by demographic crises, armed conflicts, natural disasters, environmental degradation, state incapacities, famine and poverty. e pandemic’s refractory impacts on women and girls – and humanity writ large – are nothing short of catastrophic. In the third decade of the HIV pandemic, women and particularly young women and girls have become a growing proportion of those affected and infected. Nearly half of the 40.3 million people living with HIV are women between the ages of 15-49.1 Gender disparities in HIV prevalence are more extreme among young women between the ages of 15-24, globally 1.6 times more likely to be living with HIV and AIDS than young men. And in sub-Saharan Africa overall, young women between 15 and 24 years old are at least three times more likely to be HIV-positive than young men.

Inter Press Service (IPS) Africa has launched a new handbook for reporters to support sustained media coverage of gender-based violence beyond 16 Days of No Violence Against Women and Children.

Reporting Gender-based Violence was officially launched during a conference in Rome on Millennium Development Goal Three (MDG3) and the role of the media. MDG3 is to “Promote gender equality and empower women”.

The Gender Trap: Women, Violence, and Poverty

Most of the people living in poverty in the world are women – more than 70 per cent, according to UN estimates. Why is it that more than two thirds of the world’s poor are women, although women are only half of the world’s population?

Polygyny & Women's Health in Sub-Sahara Africa

ABSTRACT

In this paper we review the literature on the association between polygyny and women’s health in sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that polygyny is an example of "co-operative conflict" within households, with likely implications for the vulnerability of polygynous women to illness, and for their access to treatment.

Despite the official separation of church and state in the United States, religion and politics are closely intertwined. This intertwining can be attributed both to the profound influence of religious organizations on the political process and to the secular institutions of public life which operate by presuming Protestant norms and values. The authors of this paper argue that the problem for gender equality in the United States is not the influence of religion alone, but Protestant hegemony in terms of both religious influence and secular presumption. They demonstrate this through two contrasting cases studies: policies around human trafficking during the Bush and Obama Administrations and “welfare reform” during the Clinton years. In the case of trafficking, they show how the Bush Administration’s coalition of secular feminist and conservative religious groups has given way under President Obama to a different coalition of faith-based and secular actors characterized by certain continuities of policy aims and method. The most important continuities are the persistence of carceral feminism and militarized humanitarianism. In the case of “welfare reform,” which was supported by a bipartisan coalition of conservative evangelicals and secular advocates, all of the parties used a conservative rhetoric of gender, race, and sexuality to support the policy. This coalition of conservative evangelicals and secular neoliberals easily overwhelmed the direct religious influence of both Catholic and mainline Protestant groups who stood in opposition to “welfare reform.” In both of these cases, it is argued that the major policy alternatives are those that raise not just the issue of religious influence on policies affecting gender equality, but also question neoliberalism and its impact on gender relations and women’s lives. In forming political alliances, the authors emphasize, feminists should situate gender within a broad array of political and economic concerns while challenging Protestant dominance in both its religious and secular guises.

In this paper, I explore some progressive Islamic feminist organizations and their contributions to popularizing Islamic reform movements in Indonesia through their popular pioneering agendas. Some pioneers of progressive Muslim feminists, such as P3M, FK3, PUAN Amal Hayati and Rahima have killed two birds with one stone. They made an important impact on reducing stigma against Islamic reform ideas and feminism. Many Indonesian Muslims often consider Islamic reform movements and feminism a Western conspiracy to destroy Islam. Progressive Muslim feminist groups’ approaches to local Muslim scholars of pesantren (traditional Islamic boarding school) are vital in shifting these local leaders to be focal points of Islamic reform. With more popular issues of Islamic reform, such as reproductive rights and domestic violence, they create an efficient step to introduce Islamic reform movements to Muslims at the grassroot level.

1. In many countries forms of discrimination against women are based on or attributed to
religion and culture and may be tolerated or even legalized.

2. International human rights instruments almost all assume gender equality and proscribe
discrimination. However, women’s rights to some individual freedoms such as freedom of
religion or belief may not have received sufficient attention when set against the collective
manifestations of such individual freedoms as those of religion or belief.

3. A basic and sensitive problem arises where the fundamental, universal rights of women are
claimed by religious communities to be in conflict with what are seen as their religious
obligations, which in turn are difficult to differentiate from the cultural or ethnic dimension.

4. The right to difference and cultural specificity implied by freedom of religion or belief is to
some degree incompatible with universal rights, especially those of women, who are often the
victims of a certain view of religious freedom, particularly in situations of conflict and
identity crisis.

5. This study addresses these apparent contradictions by seeking to define religion, to see the
relationship of religion to culture, and of universality to cultural specificities.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3
2. Definition 3
3. Contextual Background 4
4. Legal Background 5
5. General Locale 6
6. Underlying Rationale (seasons) 7
7. Perpetrators 7
8. The Jordanian Case 8
8-1 General 8
8-2 Combating the Social Syndrome 10
8-3 Defenders 11
8-4 Statistics 11
9. Recommendations 13
10. References 14