From DEBRA@oln.comlink.apc.orgThu Sep 7 10:27:16 1995 Date: Tue, 05 Sep 1995 14:38:00 +0100 From: Debra Guzman Reply to: beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org To: beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org Subject: WCW: Tribunal at Huairou [The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] ## author : theearthtime@igc.apc.org ## date : 04.09.95 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Tribunal at Huairou By C. Gerald Fraser Earth Times News Service They may have been beaten, raped by employers and relatives, economically exploited, termed untouchable, coerced as sexual slaves, jailed, hospitalized because of differences, or forced to marry, but 22 women with devastating stories declared they are survivors not victims of human rights denied and demanded that governments be held accountable. Mary McGoldrick, a battered wife and mother of three from Ireland,.told the Global Tribunal on Accountability for Women's Human Rights that neither relatives, nor the police, nor medical authorities saw her 11 years of beatings by her husband as a reason to protect her. Several hundred women and some men crowded into the auditorium of the Beijing-Huairou International Conference Center at the NGO Forum to witness the tribunal. Eleven women told their own stories and the experiences of 11 were related by human rights activists. Tribune sponsors included Rutgers University's Center for Women's Global Leadership and the United Nations Development Fund for Women. UNIFEM's director, Noeleen Heyzer, said women want control over themselves in their private lives and this will lead to control over themselves in their public lives. And the center's director, Charlotte Bunch, asked, "Will the UN rise as a defender of human rights or must we go elsewhere?" There were four categories of violations, according to the sponsors: Violence in conflict and in the family; economic discrimination and exploitation; violations of health and bodily integrity; and political persecution. Three tribunal judges made statements after the testimonies. Jacqueline Pitanguy said attention must be paid to education for the girl child, men must be offered other roles than aggressor and protector against other men, and it is necessary to understand "why conservative forces are still advancing over the our social and individual rights." She is a political scientist in Brazil and is affiliated with the International Human Rights Council of the Carter Center for Human Rights. A second judge, Pierre Sane, executive director of Amnesty International, said governments have failed and asked, among other things, that the international community rebuild the judicial system of Rwanda, that the Platform for Action state that rape is a war crime, and that human rights be guaranteed for women activists. The third judge, Sharon Hong, a law professor at the City University of New York Law School and a Chinese American, interpreted for herself when the Chinese interpretation had temporary lapses. Hong said there is a need for "stronger, clear human rights standards and a human rights framework for the implementation of economic, social and cultural rights--international human rights standards to which the monetary and policies of the international financial institutions will be held accountable. She asked that these institutions regularly report to the UN's Economic and Social Commission on the impact on women of their policies Religious fundamentalism was one factor which brought about violations of women's human rights. Zazi Sadou, an Algerian activist described the detention camps where Muslim fundamentalists enslave, rape, torture, and force women and girls into pregnancy. And Lidia Casas, a Chilean activist, told of a Chilean woman who had an involuntary hysterectomy, her arm amputated, was imprisoned and underwent verbal abuse in a public hospital because she had an abortion which in Catholic Chile is illegal. Thea DuBow, a woman with a master's degree who lived in Westchester County, one of the US's richest counties, told her own story. Married at age 21, her nine-and-a-half years of marriage, during which her husband isolated her from her family and friends and battered her, ended when she killed her husband in self defense. She served four years in prison because, she said, "the judge told me I should have known better." She now is the assistant director of My Sister's Place, an organization helping abused women. Daphne Scholinski, told of being hospitalized for severe depression and treated for "gender identity disorder" and her physical and psychological abuse by staff and doctors because she could not adopt a more "feminine" manner. Scholinski is a self-described lesbian. In addition to human rights violations affecting individual women, the tribunal heard instances of mass violations against women. Felicite Umutanguha and Bernadette Kanzayire documented war crimes against women in Rwanda and want the new International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to punish war criminals there. Two women from Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, reported on the harmful and in many cases fatal residue of nuclear testing which took place 100 miles from their city. There are 850,000 "registered victims," said Galina Sumarokova. She and Dina Igsatova survived 44 years of testing which ended in 1989. Numerous birth deformities have resulted--"you can't hide from the north winds," Igsatova said, through an interpreter. The Kazakhstani women added that victims were never given adequate attention. Representing the Dalit community of India, Ruth Kamalavalli, said 250 million Dalit people are an "oppressed and broken people, pushed to the bottom of the pile, the slave of slaves." They have been termed the untouchables, but call themselves Dalit. Most women raped in her country, she said, are Dalit women. And she asked for a special rapporteur to meet with Dalit victims of violence. Economic exploitation was also a source of human rights deprivation according to Guadalupe Torres and Julia Quinones de Gonzalez, organizers for the Border Committee of Women Workers. The two contend that Maquiladora factories in the free-trade zone along the US-Mexico border has brought about economic and social destruction in the lives of women workers. Mahfouda Alley Hamid, a poet, journalist, mother, and farmer from Tanzania, described the destruction of small business for women, the lowered value of Tanzanian money, and the loss of public services after her country undertook structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. She earned applause and cheers when she read her poem, "Enough is Enough."