Equality Now Reports: CNN ON LASHING OF SAUDI ARABIAN RAPE VICTIM

Taina Bien-Aime, Executive Director of Equality Now will be on the Glenn Beck show on CNN tonight, November 19th at 7pm, 9pm and midnight to discuss the case of the Saudi Arabian rape victim who has been sentenced to 200 lashes and 6 months imprisonment. See below for further information. We hope you can watch the show.

EQUALITY NOW CONDEMNS SAUDI ARABIAN COURT RULING
SENTENCING RAPE VICTIM TO 200 LASHES AND 6 MONTHS IMPRISONMENT


New York, November 19, 2007. A 19-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, was brutally attacked and gang raped by 7 men approximately 18 months ago, according to media reports. While seeking justice in her case, the woman was herself sentenced in October 2006 to 90 lashes for being in the company of an unrelated man at the time of the attack. She appealed this decision to a higher court, and the Qatif General Court announced on Wednesday November 14, 2007, that the victim's sentence had been more than doubled to 200 lashes and 6 months in prison, a gross violation of human rights including the right to be free from discrimination and from torture and other cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment. Following this decision the rape victim’s lawyer had his license to practice revoked. While the courts have not clarified why the sentence was increased, media reports suggest that the harsher sentence for the rape victim and the confiscation of her lawyer’s license were directly related to their decision to speak with Saudi Arabian media about the injustice in this case. If true, this retaliation clearly violates the fundamental human right to freedom of expression.

Equality Now is calling on the Ministry of Justice of Saudi Arabia to immediately revoke this sentence of lashing and imprisonment of the rape victim, which is a travesty of justice. Equality Now is also calling on the Ministry to restore her legal representation by rescinding its decision to revoke the license of her lawyer. Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director stated, "This verdict by the Saudi Arabian court is blatantly discriminatory and violates several fundamental rights of the victim as well as her lawyer. We urge the Saudi Arabian authorities to undo this injustice immediately. They need to ensure that the victim is treated as a victim and not as a criminal. The international human rights community will continue to closely monitor the case and provide solidarity to advocates on the ground until the victim is safe from state sponsored violence and discrimination.”

Equality Now is an international human rights organization based in New York, Nairobi and London that works to protect and promote the civil, political, economic and social rights of girls and women. Equality Now’s Women’s Action Network comprises 30,000 groups and individual members in over 160 countries. For more information please visit www.equalitynow.org.

TAKE ACTION
Please contact the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington DC, or in your country if not the US, as well as the State Department in the US or your country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Call on these officials to convey your concern over this injustice and to take whatever action is in their power to protect this Saudi rape victim from lashing and imprisonment. In the US, please contact:

Saudi Arabian Ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, in Washington D.C. at (202) 342-3800
Or
Consulates General in: New York at (212) 752-2740, Los Angeles at (310) 479-6000, Houston (713) 785-5577

Still Here, by Being Stubborn, Not Mellow, New York Times, August 7

Fox on Pimp Culture: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,97519,00.html
Hip hop videos: sex exploitation on the set: http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/vh1_news_presents/96137/episode.jhtml

Still Here, by Being Stubborn, Not Mellow

Separately, they’re the rappers Pimp C, left, and Bun B; together they’re known as UGK.

By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: August 7, 2007
The New York Times

What do rappers lose when they get older? In the case of Bun B and Pimp C, two rappers in their 30s from Port Arthur, Tex., who perform together as UGK, the answer is, not much.

Lots has happened to them since they first got together, in the late 1980s. They helped put nearby Houston on the hip-hop map, and they helped inspire a generation of Southern hip-hop stars, from OutKast to Lil Wayne. They had a fluke hit when Jay-Z invited them to add verses to his song “Big Pimpin’,” in 1999. Then they had an even flukier miss, a couple of years later, when record-company disputes sabotaged “Dirty Money,” the 2001 album that should have been their breakthrough. Soon after the album’s release, Pimp C went to prison, where he served almost four years on charges stemming from an aggravated-assault conviction. Bun B lobbied tirelessly for his imprisoned partner, shouting, “Free Pimp C!” whenever he got near a microphone, which was often.

Through it all, they have put together a solid ­ sometimes brilliant ­ series of albums, guest appearances and mixtape tracks. Almost from the start, UGK was known for tough but smooth rhymes delivered over elegant, leisurely beats. Their lyrics chronicle a Texan underworld full of pimps who talk slick, pushers who talk tough, snitches who talk too much. They are, among other things, astute chroniclers of Southern poverty, but they’re not particularly interested in being good guys.

They prove that once more on their long-awaited new double album, “Underground Kingz” (Jive), which arrives in stores today. In a silky song called “Gravy,” Bun B waxes physiological: “When I put one up in your dome/You’ll be leakin’ out plasma and pus, and your mouth’ll fill up with foam.”

Somehow, these two have grown older and wiser without outgrowing their genre; you never get the feeling that they think they’re too good for this kind of thing. Other veterans succeed by rising above the fray, but these two succeed by remaining part of it.

In 1992, when UGK made a major-label debut with “Too Hard to Swallow,” a long career hardly seemed guaranteed. On the contrary, some listeners probably thought these two were just a couple of Texas knuckleheads cashing in on the so-called gangsta-rap fad. And yet gangsta rap, broadly speaking ­ streetwise protagonists, explicit lyrics, hard-boiled stories ­ turned out to be hip-hop’s future, to the consternation of gripers past and present. Southern gangsta rap, in particular. It’s now clear that Bun B and Pimp C were ahead of their time.

Not that it would have mattered if they hadn’t been so obsessed with craft. Pimp C is the group’s main producer, and he has created a brilliantly effective template: hard, loping drums; slow-motion bass lines; suave nods to 1970s soul.

He’s also a flamboyant rapper, equipped with a pinched, braying voice and a tendency to lean hard into vowels, bending them to his will. (He also has a reputation for obstreperousness; he recently had to apologize to the entire city of Atlanta for claiming that it wasn’t really part of the South.)

Meanwhile, Bun B is the diplomatic wordsmith, respected and even beloved by his peers. He is equally capable of an unexpected insight or a brute-force barrage of steady syllables, with shifting stress patterns and varied line lengths to keep listeners off balance.

True to UGK form, the new CDs didn’t have a smooth voyage from recording studio to record store. The first single, “The Game Belongs to Me,” never caught on at radio, which helps explain why the album’s release date kept being moved back.

The second single is a glorious confection called “Int’l Players Anthem,” with a couple of spectacular guest verses from the members of OutKast and a lush beat (sampling Willie Hutch) by Three 6 Mafia. It’s just about perfect, and unexpectedly romantic, but it’s probably too unhurried ­ too stubborn, you might say ­ to be a pop hit.

In fact, stubbornness is one of this duo’s greatest virtues. You can hear it all over “Underground Kingz,” a double-album that’s solid to a fault. There are guests ranging from the dirty-rap pioneer Too $hort to the British motormouth Dizzee Rascal; from Z-Ro, the moody Houstonite, to Talib Kweli, the levelheaded Brooklynite. But most of the tracks were produced by or with Pimp C, who hews closely to the formula he invented. Fans have been waiting five years for a new UGK album, and apparently now it’s time to overdose.

There is plenty of old-fashioned trash talking here. More than once, Bun B reminds listen ers that he and his partner have brash new nicknames: Big Dick Cheney and Tony Snow. Throughout these two CDs, kilos are sold, foes are threatened, cars are painted and repainted, prostitutes are put in their place.

But you can also hear a bracing kind of clarity, and maybe it’s the kind that comes with age. In “Still Ridin’ Dirty,” Bun B provides some grim context for the unapologetic rhymes elsewhere on the album:

“You live by the gun, you’ll die by the slugs, man/You live off of fiends, you’ll die behind drugs, man.” This is an acknowledgment, but it’s not a disavowal. And in “How Long Can It Last,” he scoffs at the idea that drug dealers are having fun: “They wish they lived in the ’burbs, wish they didn’t have to hang/out on corners in low-income housing projects and slang.”

Bun B and Pimp C are keenly attuned to the way these antiheroes make a virtue of necessity, the way a struggle to survive comes to seem like a swashbuckling adventure. Indeed, they are never more vehement than when they’re expounding on the aesthetics and ethics of street life. At one point, Bun B lists the group’s core values: honor, respect, valor and guts. (Actually, “guts” isn’t the word he uses, but it’s close enough.)

And in “Take tha Hood Back,” Bun B fulminates against would-be kingpins who are “really hustlin’ wrong” by associating with snitches, and he sounds like the exasperated elder he is when he huffs, “I’m teachin’ classes: Dope Slangin’ 101.” Kids today: they just don’t sell crack the way they used to.

Like all veterans, these two look back fondly on the world that made them. It’s nostalgia, but if anything, it’s nostalgia for a crueler world, not a gentler one. All these years later, their seeming nihilism seems more like integrity: a clear-eyed commitment to an old-fashioned ideal, despite its contradictions.

Surely this is part of the reason they have lasted so long, and aged so well. In their rhymes you can hear the irrational, irresistible process by which bad old days are transformed into good ones.

Suggested read: Kathleen Barry, http://www.amazon.com/Female-Sexual-Slavery-Kathleen-Barry/dp/0814710697

Unicef report on commercial sexual exploitation:
http://www.unicef.org/newsline/01pr97.htm

Cote d'Ivoire - Ivory Coast

Direct Website Link to Report:

http://hrw.org/reports/2007/cdi0807/

http://hrw.org:80/english/docs/2007/08/01/cotedi16558.htm

Côte d’Ivoire: Peace Process Fails to Address Sexual Violence

National Authorities and International Community Must Act to Reverse Impunity

(Abidjan, August 2, 2007) – Pro-government and rebel forces in Côte d’Ivoire have subjected thousands of women and girls to rape and other brutal sexual assaults with impunity, Human Rights Watch said in a new report issued today. Despite recent progress in the peace process, the latest accord fails to address this widespread sexual violence or the need for accountability.

Sexual violence has been the silent crime of Côte d’Ivoire’s military and political crisis. Combatants responsible for rape and other acts of sexual violence have enjoyed almost complete impunity, while the survivors have been denied both justice and medical attention. Peter Takirambudde, Africa director of Human Rights Watch

While the worst sexual violence took place during the height of the armed conflict from 2002 to 2004, women and girls continue to be subjected to acts of sexual violence.

“Sexual violence has been the silent crime of Côte d’Ivoire’s military and political crisis,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director of Human Rights Watch. “Combatants responsible for rape and other acts of sexual violence have enjoyed almost complete impunity, while the survivors have been denied both justice and medical attention.”

The 135-page report, “My Heart is Cut": Sexual Violence by Rebels and Pro-Government Forces in Côte d’Ivoire, details the widespread nature of sexual violence throughout the five-year military-political crisis. The report, which is based on interviews with more than 180 victims and witnesses, documents how women and girls have been subjected to individual and gang rape, sexual slavery, forced incest and other egregious sexual assaults.

Fighters on both sides have raped women old enough to be their grandmothers, girls as young as 6, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers. They have also inserted guns, sticks, pens, and other objects into their victims’ vaginas. Combatants have abducted women and girls to serve as sex slaves, and have forcibly conscripted them into the fighting forces. Sexual violence has been often accompanied by other gross human rights violations against the victims, their families and their communities, including torture, killing, mutilation and even cannibalism.

Côte d’Ivoire – once considered a pillar of stability and progress in West Africa – has for at least seven years been consumed by a political and military crisis rooted in ethnic, religious, political and economic issues. Efforts to resolve the armed conflict between the government and northern-based rebels have produced a string of unfulfilled peace agreements, the deployment of more than 11,000 foreign peacekeeping troops, and the imposition of a UN arms embargo and travel and economic sanctions. In March, the government and rebels signed the Ouagadougou Agreement, envisioned to bring about an end to the crisis and lead to elections later this year. To date, both sides have taken encouraging steps toward its implementation, but the peace process has not resolved key issues that have contributed to the breakdown of previous accords in the past, particularly the criteria for establishing Ivorian citizenship, disarmament, and accountability for abuses by all sides.

Victims of sexual violence told Human Rights Watch about the acute physical and psychological distress they suffered as a result of rape. The report details how some rape victims died because of the sexual violence they endured. Others were raped so violently that they suffered serious bleeding, tearing in the genital area, long-term incontinence, and severe infections. Others suffered from botched abortions following the sexual assault. Many complained of bleeding, deep abdominal aches, and burning pains. Countless victims suffered from sexually transmitted infections and were put at high risk for the transmission of HIV/AIDS. Deterred by shame and poverty, few survivors of sexual violence ever receive the medical help they need.

The Ivorian government and the rebel New Forces (Forces Nouvelles) have made scant efforts to investigate or prosecute perpetrators of even the most heinous crimes involving sexual violence. This failure has contributed to an environment of increasingly entrenched lawlessness where impunity prevails. For its part, the international community has consistently sidelined initiatives to combat impunity in Côte d’Ivoire, presumably due to a fear of upsetting negotiation efforts.

“The government and the rebels alike have turned a blind eye to rape and other abuses committed by their forces,” said Takirambudde. “This has only emboldened perpetrators on both sides of the military divide.”

Sexual violence took place throughout Côte d’Ivoire, especially in the hotly contested western regions, which experienced the most fighting. Mixed groups of Liberian and Sierra Leonean fighters – operating as mercenaries in support of both the Ivorian government and rebel forces – were guilty of especially egregious and widespread sexual abuse. However, even after the end of active hostilities, from 2004 onwards, sexual violence has remained a significant problem throughout both rebel- and government-held areas.

In rebel-held territory, and particularly in the west, some women were targeted for abuse because of their ethnicity or perceived pro-government affiliation, often because their husband, father or another male relative worked for the state. Many others appeared to have been targeted randomly for sexual assault. Women and girls were subjected to sexual violence in their homes, as they sought refuge after being found hiding in forests, when stopped at military checkpoints, while working on farms, and at places of worship. Numerous women and girls were abducted and subjected to sexual slavery in rebel camps where they endured sexual abuse over extended periods of time. Resistance was frequently met with horrific punishment or even death. Some sex slaves, intimidated by their captors and the other circumstances, felt powerless to escape their life of sexual slavery. An unknown number of such women and girls remain with their captors.

Pro-government forces – including members of the gendarmerie, police, army, and militias – were widely responsible for rape and other forms of sexual abuse against women and girls, especially in the heavily contested western region and along frontlines. In addition to sexual violence associated with open hostilities, pro-government forces targeted women and girls whom they suspected of supporting the rebels, particularly women who were Muslim, came from the north or from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali, or were thought to support opposition political parties. Law enforcement officers, militia men, and other pro-government forces abused women at checkpoints, during raids, in makeshift prisons, and in marketplaces. The scale of violations by pro-government forces appeared to increase during periods of heightened political tension.

Human Rights Watch called on the Ivorian government and rebels to investigate and punish perpetrators in accordance with international standards. The United Nations Security Council should expedite the publication of the report of the 2004 UN Commission of Inquiry into human rights violations committed since 2002, and should discuss its findings and recommendations. The Ivorian government and its development partners must act promptly to provide much-needed medical, psychological and social services to the countless survivors of sexual assault. Lastly, given the fact that rights abuses have very often escalated during periods of heightened political tension, Human Rights Watch emphasized that drawdown or withdrawal of United Nations peacekeepers must wait until after presidential and legislative elections.

“Ivorian and rebel authorities must demonstrate their commitment to the rule of law now and in the future by committing to prosecute key individuals responsible for atrocities, including those atrocities documented in this report,” said Takirambudde. “The organizations and governments working to consolidate peace, namely the United Nations, the French government and the African Union, must assist them in developing a concrete strategy for doing this.”

Selected testimony from victims interviewed for the report:

One young woman who was in her late teens when she was detained in 2003 as a sex slave in a rebel camp recounted:

They took me and for a week they raped me all the time, they locked me in a home. They used to tie me up with my legs spread apart and arms tied behind me to rape me. They’d rape me three or four in the night, they would put their guns next to you and if you refuse they kill you. They killed one of my friends and made us bury her. We were about 10 or 15 girls there, being raped.

A mother who was raped and whose two adolescent daughters had firewood shoved into their vaginas by rebels in 2002 described her agony:

Frankly I don’t know how I will cope. They took sticks to put in the vaginas of my two daughters ... When they took out the wood they put their hands in. Really, they ruined my children. The blood was running ... they told me to wipe it up. Wood, hands ... when they were done ... they beat my girls again and said they will kill us. I had to clean up the blood from my daughters.

A woman of Malian origin, living in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Abidjan, described how she was raped by soldiers in front of her husband on March 25, 2004:

During the crisis which followed the opposition march, I was raped by the military. They came into our house. My husband was in the living room and my three children were in their rooms. The soldiers locked the kids up. I was just coming out from the shower. They forced my husband to sit and watch them raping me under the threat of their guns. This shame prevents me from looking at my husband today.

A Muslim woman of Malian origin described the gang-rape of her sister by seven uniformed pro-government soldiers who wanted to ascertain the whereabouts of their brother, an opposition activist:

My big brother was in the RDR ... They came looking for him. We [my sisters and I] said “he is out.” They said, “we will kill the three of you if you don’t get him to come.” They found a notebook with his number and called him. He said “I am coming, just take some money, please don’t hurt them.” They hit me with a gun and broke my arm. Then they took my beautiful tallest older sister, tied her up and raped her over and over.

A woman who had been raped for over a year during the war by rebels in Bouake explained her appalling physical condition after managing to escape:

I could hardly walk, was bleeding all the time. I had no money for cloths to stop the bleeding or even for food ... I was so sick, they chased me away from the hospital, my living conditions were awful, I smelled bad, I couldn’t sleep, I crawled like a baby because I couldn’t walk, I felt so bad, I didn’t have anyone to help me.

Rape and Post-Conflict Justice, August 2, 2007

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/242217

Rape and Post-Conflict Justice

Aug 02, 2007 Noeleen Heyzer

The lengthy prison terms for war crimes and crimes against humanity handed down by the Special Court for Sierra Leone last month have been greeted with widespread praise. Two senior members of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council were sentenced to 50 years' imprisonment and another to 45 years for atrocities, including rape, committed during the country's civil war.
Indeed, calling senior military leaders to account for sexual crimes against women is a historic achievement. The July 19 sentencing reaffirms that rape is among the gravest violations of international law, on par with acts of mass murder and terrorism.

The precedent set by the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as the investigations into Central African Republic and Darfur being conducted by the International Criminal Court, suggests that post-conflict justice for sexual violence may at last be becoming the rule rather than the exception.

Yet during the 11 years of brutal civil war in Sierra Leone, more than 50 per cent of the country's women and girls suffered sexual violence. Five years later, only 11 suspects have been indicted.

This means that thousands of women will never see their rapists brought to justice. They will, instead, continue to see them in the streets, parks and marketplaces of their communities. For these women, there is no closure to the trauma of wartime rape. Peace brings no peace of mind. And there is no equality before the law.

The women of Sierra Leone look to the Special Court as an emblem of hope for ending impunity. But beyond the high-profile cases that the Court is mandated to take on, it is also hoped that it will help bolster the capacity of local courts to convict the thousands of lower-ranking rapists who walk free. This is indeed the best hope for resurrecting the rule of law in a war-ravaged nation.

Regrettably, international support for the rehabilitation of justice systems and the rule of law has not prioritized women's access to justice. This has generally been sidelined in favour of market-oriented reform, such as revising corporate laws to improve the investment climate.
Such an approach overlooks the fact that age-old social and economic inequalities – including those between women and men – are often the root causes of conflict, instability or economic stagnation.

So while provisions for prosecuting rape are firmly established in international law, a lack of political will and financial support leads to foot-dragging. For women living in the midst of their tormentors, justice delayed is more than justice denied – it is terror continued.
We must urgently ensure that laws on paper are matched by action. Appalled by reports from clinics in war-torn countries of genital injuries caused by rape, and aware of the need for global action, 12 UN organizations, including UNIFEM, have come together in the UN Action against Sexual Violence in Conflict.

Alongside women's groups and NGOs worldwide we are working to break the silence surrounding sexual abuse, build communities that say no to violence against women and enhance women's access to justice.

For centuries, women have borne the guilt and taint of rape in the absence of any formal attribution of liability. Now, the prospect of consistent, expedient justice according to law places this burden squarely where it belongs – with the perpetrators.

The sentences in Sierra Leone remind us that by calling for the effective prosecution of every perpetrator regardless of rank, we can all contribute to making rape a rule of law priority in national and international courts, in times of war and peace.

Noeleen Heyzer is executive director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).