Amnesty International calls to protect Women’s Rights in Afghanistan

May 24, 2012

Amnesty International calls to protect Women’s Rights in Afghanistan

“We all want stability and peace, but not at the price of women’s rights. We’re told that women’s rights are a development issue, not a security issue. But women’s rights are part of what the fighting is all about.”
-Afifa Azim, coordinator of the Afghan Women’s Network, an umbrella organization of over 84 NGOs and 5,000 individual members.

“We will not abandon you, we will stand with you always…[it is] essential that women’s rights and women’s opportunities are not sacrificed or trampled in the reconciliation process.”
-US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton speaking to female Afghan officials in 2010

Hard-won gains for women could be seriously compromised as the Afghan government and its international partners pursue reconciliation and peace negotiations with leaders of the Taleban and other insurgent groups, without ensuring mechanisms to guarantee human rights.

Many Afghan women fear that their rights may be sacrificed in the search for a settlement with Taleban leaders. In areas they currently control, the Taleban continue to curtail women’s human rights severely. They have carried out a concerted attack on girls’ education and have murdered women prominent in public life. Afghan women’s human rights defenders fear that their newly won rights will be severely eroded if the Taleban are brought back into government.

Read more in “Afghanistan: Don’t trade away women’s human rights

Related Posts:

War is a Racket! by The Department of Homeland Inspiration – featuring the Art Ranger and Michael Sheridan

War is a Racket! by The Department of Homeland Inspiration – featuring the Art Ranger and Michael Sheridan

Art Ranger, along with her colleague Michael Sheridan, review “War is a Racket” by Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler. This highly decorated war hero becomes dogged activist and tours the country giving speeches about how he was in effect, a bully for the corporations, then quit.  Art Ranger and Sheridan share excerpts of the text as well as a piece of their minds. Sonic textures provided by our back up band, The Dirty Pens.

ON THE MEDIA | Disrupting Journalism: How Platforms Have Upended the News, Columbia Journalism Review

ON THE MEDIA | Disrupting Journalism: How Platforms Have Upended the News, Columbia Journalism Review

After decades of shrinking revenues, and an increasing expectation among consumers that journalism should be free, the global media industry has reached a crisis point. As legacy news outlets shut down or lay off staff, misinformation and conspiracy theories run rampant, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Trust in our institutions of governance continues to decline, fueling an alarming rise in extremism and political violence across previously stable democracies. In the Global South, the impact of journalism’s decline has been even more striking, with the rise of a new generation of autocrats skilled in manipulating the online conversation to suit their consolidation of power.

ON THE MEDIA | Meet the Next Generation of Mexican Filmmakers, Global Press Journal

ON THE MEDIA | Meet the Next Generation of Mexican Filmmakers, Global Press Journal

After the 1994 [Zapatista] uprising, a boom in documentary films focused on indigenous themes and communities — but the overwhelming majority, Sojob says, were made by people from outside the state. Her own interest in storytelling began when, using a camera that her father gave her, she recorded an ongoing land conflict between the people of Chenalhó and the neighboring town of Chalchihuitán. Unless there was some sort of testimony, she realized, no one would know what was happening, “that it was us, ourselves, who had to get out everything that was happening within, from our own context, from our community.”

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *