Women’s Rights
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This Week’s Spotlight on Human Rights
Tags Share Records Show DC and Federal Law Enforcement Sharing Surveillance Info on Racial Justice Protests A public records lawsuit brought by the Brennan Center and Data for Black Lives revealed that the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) collaborated with federal law enforcement agencies to surveil protestors in 2020 and 2021. We obtained…
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Supporting rights of incarcerated women by providing free period products
Tags Share As we move forward from Women’s History month, it is important to keep advocating for the rights of women everywhere, including the rights of incarcerated women. Many women in prison have difficulty obtaining adequate period products due to cost, resulting in women bartering with other inmates or doing without. This lack of period…
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Ending Violence Against Women and Gender Inequality: Our Work and Impact
Tags Share Claudina Isabel’s body was discovered on August 13, 2005 with signs of sexual violence. The Guatemalan government’s impunity and ineffective investigation into her murder is, unfortunately, representative of a broader failure of the government to stem the tide of femicide and violence against women in the country. Read more about our work on…
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Nearly 20 years after murder of Claudina Isabel Velásquez Paiz, Guatemalan government to publicly acknowledge responsibility March 8
Tags Share On Friday, March 8, Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo and members of his government will hold a public act to acknowledge responsibility for the murder of 19-year old Claudina Isabel Velásquez Paiz in 2005 and subsequent impunity. Here are five key things to know about the case: 1. On August 12, 2005, when Claudina…
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Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai was born in 1997 in the Swat district of Pakistan. She was educated by her father, Ziauddin, a poet and the owner of several private schools, who dissuaded her from a career as a doctor and encouraged her to pursue politics instead. In 2007, the Taliban, an extremist Islamic group, began fighting the…
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Sonita Alizadeh
When Sonita Alizadeh was born in Afghanistan in 1996, the country was controlled by the Taliban. Daily life was dangerous, and her childhood was quite difficult. She was only 10 when her family tried to sell her to a man who wanted to marry her—a very common occurrence in too many countries around the world.…
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Tawakkol Karman
Tawakkol Karman was born in 1979 in Taiz, Yemen’s third largest city, often described as a place of learning in a conservative country. In 1990, she witnessed the unification of North and South Yemen, followed by a civil war in 1994 in which the North triumphed. This led to dissidence in the South, as the…
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Juliana Dogbadzi
Interview with Kerry Kennedy I have never been in a classroom. I have never been to school. When I was seven years old, my parents took me from our home and sent me to a shrine where I was a slave to a fetish priest for seventeen years. My grandfather, they said, had stolen two…
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Erin Merryn
At age six, Erin experienced sexual abuse for the first time by a neighbor at a friend’s sleepover. Just a few weeks shy of her seventh birthday in 1992, Erin was raped by the same person. Threatened and scared, Erin went to bed every night crying, having nightmares, afraid to tell anyone what had happened…
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Wangari Maathai
Wangari Maathai was born in Kenya in 1940 to a family of farmers, giving her a deep connection to the land. At that time, Kenya was a British colony, and British officials held the power to make decisions for the Kenyan people. But as Maathai was growing up, the British government was in the process…
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Rana Husseini
Biography Journalist, feminist, and human rights defender, Rana Husseini broke the silence and exposed the shame of Jordan when she unveiled the common but unspoken crime of honor killings there. Honor killings happen when a woman is raped or is said to have participated in illicit sexual activity. Across the globe, women who are beaten,…
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Fauziya Kassindja
Biography: Fauziya Kassindja narrowly escaped female genital mutilation by fleeing from her remote village in Togo under cover of night and making her way to the United States where, in December 1994, she sought political asylum. Instead of receiving this seventeen-year-old orphan with understanding and humanity, U.S. officials proceeded to strip her naked, put her…
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