Resources by Region
Ending Female Genital Mutilation - A Strategy for the European Union Institutions
Ending Female Genital Mutilation - A Strategy for the European Union Institutions
Three million girls and women are subjected to female genital mutilation worldwide each year. That's 8000 girls per day.
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a form of violence against women and children that can amount to torture.
Making the Rights of Children Effective and Enforceable
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.
Abusing Women, Abusing Islam
Abusing Women, Abusing Islam: Re-Examining Sharia Court Rulings in Contemporary Time
How women fare correlates directly with how society fares overall. The complex and appalling stream of news reports describing Muslim women being punished under Islamic law for everything from wearing pants to not having sex with their husbands to being raped cannot be ignored. Muslim women around the world are being disproportionately abused using outdated Islamic rulings and ages-old customs, while men who commit the same actions often go free.
The Gender Trap: Women, Violence, and Poverty
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?
Muslim Women and Domestic Violence: Bibliography: 3 Key Topics
The Asian & Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence has compiled below a short bibliography listing key works by activists and scholars on domestic violence against Muslim women.
"Religion Revisited - Women’s rights and the political instrumentalisation of religion"
"Religion Revisited - Women’s rights and the political instrumentalisation of religion"
The Heinrich Böll Foundation, jointly with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), organized the international conference "Religion Revisited - Women’s rights and the political instrumentalisation of religion" in Berlin on 5 and 6 June 2009. Scholars and feminist activists discussed the question of how to deal with religions in the fight for women’s rights and gender equality.
HUMAN RIGHTS, STATE AND NON-STATE LAW
This report highlights human rights impacts and dilemmas associated with plural state and non-state laws, such as family laws based on religion, customary justice practices and Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanisms. Drawing on examples of such plural legal orders from around the world, it proposes principles and a framework to guide human rights practitioners and policy-makers.
The report also identifies challenges related to incorporation of non-state law in state law, recognition of cultural differences in law, and justice sector reform. Emphasising the contested nature of culture, especially when dealing with gender equality, religious freedom and indigenous peoples’ rights, it calls for evidence-based assessments of plural legal orders that give special attention to people on the margins of state and non-state law, and equality between and within communities.
Study on the Freedom of Religion or Belief and the Status of Women From the Viewpoint of Religion and Traditions
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.
HONOUR RELATED VIOLENCE
In this paper we will therefore examine the exact meaning of a number of concepts related to honour related violence, the most important being: honour, social status, face, family, honour killing, honour related violence.
There is a certain tendancy to consider honour related violence a subcategory of domestic violence or of male violence against women. However, the term itself reveals no correlation to that respect. Honour related violence is related to honour just like alcohol is related to alcohol related violence. The term honour related violence in itself therefore does not reveal anything about the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, the victim's or perpetrator's gender or the place the violence takes place. The only thing it conveys is that in one way or another honour is involved.
To Specify or Single Out: Should We Use the Term “Honor Killing”?
The use of the term ‘honor killing’ has elicited strong reactions from a variety of groups for years; but the recent Aqsa Parvez and Aasiya Hassan cases have brought a renewed interest from women’s rights activists, community leaders, and law enforcement to study the term and come to a consensus on its validity and usefulness, particularly in the North American and European Diaspora. While some aver that the term ‘honor killing’ is an appropriate description of a unique and particular crime, others deem it as rather a racist and misleading phrase used to promote violent stereotypes of particular communities, particularly Muslim minorities in North America and Europe.This article works to lay the groundwork by presenting both sides of the debate over the term ‘honor killing’ and analyzing the arguments various groups use in order to justify their particular definition of the term, and if and how they support its use in public discourse. I argue two main points: one, that ‘honor killing’ exists as a specific form of violence against women, having particular characteristics that warrants its classification as a unique category of violence. Second, I show that while ‘honor killings’ are recognized as such in many non-Western contexts, there is a trend among advocacy organizations in the North American and European Diaspora to avoid, ignore, or rebuke the term ‘honor killings’ as a misleading label that is racist, xenophobic, and/or harmful to Muslim populations. This is a direct response to misuse of the term mostly within media outlets and public discourse that serves to further marginalize Muslim and immigrant groups.