Violence Against Women: UN Fact-finding Visit to U.S.

As reported by IntLawGrrls Johanna Bond, Beth Van Schaack, and yours truly, Hope Lewis in posts here, Rashida Manjoo (pictured), a former South Africa Gender Commissioner, is the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its Causes and Consequences.

Now, there's welcome news that Manjoo will be conducting a fact-finding visit to the United States of America beginning on Monday, 24 January and running through 7 February 2011. (See UN Press Release here.)
The visit is an important opportunity for organizations working to end gender-based and family violence as well as the individual women and girls who are at risk of such violence to be heard in an international context. At informal meetings sponsored by NGOs, women and girls will be able to talk with the rapporteur directly in order to identify failures or successes in state compliance, spread the word about best practices, and, most importantly, discuss specific effective strategies to prevent and remedy violence against women at local, national, and international levels.
Intersectionality and Interdependence
As Johanna Bond discusses in her post, Manjoo and some other special rapporteurs take an “intersectional” approach. Intersectionality recognizes the multiple aspects of identity (including dimensions like gender, race, culture, class, sexual orientation, and disability) that influence human experience. Manjoo has also reaffirmed the importance of the interdependence of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural human rights in preventing and remedying violence against women.
Plans for the Visit
An excerpt from the press release appears below:

GENEVA – The United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Rashida Manjoo, will conduct an official fact-finding mission to the United States from the 24th of January to the 7th of February 2011. “During my visit, I intend to meet with national stakeholders involved in fighting all aspects related to violence against women, with a view to appreciate the phenomenon in the United States,” said the human rights expert, who will visit the country at the invitation of the Government. The Special Rapporteur will travel to Washington D.C., North Carolina, Florida, California, Minnesota and New York City, where she will discuss the issue with government authorities at both the federal and the state levels, and with representatives of civil society. The Special Rapporteur will also visit shelters and detention centers and she will meet with individual victims of gender-based violence. A press conference on the initial findings of the visit will be held at the United Nations Information Center in Washington (1775 K ST NW, Suite 400, Washington DC) on Monday February 7 at 1 p.m. Based on the information obtained during the visit, Ms. Manjoo will present a report with her final findings and recommendations to a forthcoming session of the Human Rights Council.
Ms. Rashida Manjoo (South Africa) was appointed Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences in June 2009 by the UN Human Rights Council, for an initial period of three years. As Special Rapporteur, she is independent from any government or organization and serves in her individual capacity. Ms. Manjoo is also a Professor at the Department of Public Law at the University of Cape Town.
Additional information on the mandate of the Special Rapporteur, is available here and the OHCHR Country Page for the United States is available here.

On November 7

On this day in ...
... 1990, Ireland voted into office the country's 1st woman President. Chosen in a runoff contest was Mary Robinson (left), who'd run as an Independent. Nominated by the Labour Party and the Workers' Party of Ireland, as well as by independent senators, she was "the first elected president in the office's history not to have had the support of Fianna Fáil," a party long dominant in Irish politics. Of her election, the BBC wrote:

Mrs Robinson, a Dublin barrister, is considered radical by Irish terms.
A civil and human rights lawyer, she has campaigned for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting divorce and abortion for more than 20 years.
However, she not only won the support of women countrywide but also polled well in traditionally conservative rural areas.
The mother-of-three has been a member of the Irish Senate for more than 20 years.

In her subsequent post as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002) Robinson would not be free of controversy, either. Most recently, an online campaign has sought to draft her to become the 1st President of the European Council. She's said she doesn't want the job, but her name surfaced again in a recent Time magazine article.

(Prior November 7 posts are here and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'I believe we are finally starting to turn the page on this extremely unfortunate chapter of recent history, with counter-terrorism measures starting to move back in to line with international human rights standards. ... But there is still much to do before the Guantanamo chapter is truly brought to a close.'

-- U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay (right) yesterday, in what the Washington Post called "her most detailed statement on U.S. detention policy" to date. The full statement, which alluded to the issues of interrogation, torture, accountability for complicit lawyers and doctors, and proposed "prolonged" detention without trial, is available here.

Remembering Sharpeville

Today, March 21, is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The day marks the 1960 massacre of nearly 70 people in the Sharpeville township outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, about which IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann also posts below.
The 69 persons who died and the 300 who were injured had joined tens of thousands in a peaceful protest of the apartheid regime’s oppressive pass laws; then police “deliberately opened fire on the unarmed crowd.” (credit for photo captioned "Protestors fleeing the Sharpeville Police Station, 21 March 1960")
The U.N. General Assembly declared the day one of remembrance and action in 1966, calling on the international community “eliminate racial discrimination and apartheid.”
Yet more than 50 years after that declaration Navanethem Pillay (below right), the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and herself a native of Natal, South Africa (prior post), reports that “millions of people around the world . . . are still, today, victims of racism and racial discrimination.” Just last year, as IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales posted then, Gay McDougall, the U.N. Independent Expert on minority issues, and Githu Muigai, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance, called for an end to “anti-Roma sentiment and violence” in Europe. And in the United States, African Americans are reportedly more than 10 times likely to be sent to prison than whites for drug offenses.
Frustratingly, amid this climate of ever-present global racism, states have failed to reach consensus regarding the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, a comprehensive international program of action aimed preventing racial discrimination. The declaration was the result of the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, which, though intended to “create a new world vision for the fight against racism in the twenty-first century," was nearly derailed by disagreement regarding Israeli-Palestinian relations.
In the 8 years since Durban, negotiations around the declaration have been fraught with conflict between the parties, particularly with respect to Israel and religious defamation. Next month, from April 20 to 24, country and NGO representatives will convene at the Durban Review Conference in an effort to surmount these challenges and agree on the declaration’s text. To that end, a preparatory committee of UN member states and NGOs recently revised its draft outcome document for the conference by shortening it and converting it into a “rolling text” in hopes of breathing new momentum and confidence into the negotiations. Highlights of the rolling text include calls:
► for U.N. member states to contribute to a Trust Fund for the Programme of the Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination;
► for special attention to women, refugees and migrant workers suffering from racism and racial discrimination; and
► for renewed calls for ratification and removal of reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.
Reflecting upon the document and the challenges facing conference negotiators, Commissioner Pillay, about whom IntLawGrrl Fiona de Londras also posts today, said:

I urge all states to refrain from taking narrow politicized or polemical stances on particular issues, and to work together for the remainder of the process towards a successful outcome for the victims of racial discrimination and intolerance around the world.

Israel ousts Special Rapporteur Richard Falk

(An IntlawGrrls guest post from Lisa Hajjar)

Human rights scholar Richard Falk (right), the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, now a visiting professor in Southern California, was chosen by the Human Rights Council to be the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Palestine in June 2008. Since he was appointed, the Israeli government has stated its opposition to him, citing his criticisms of Israeli human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza. The U.S. government also opposed his appointment for the same reasons, and both governments had lobbied -- unsuccessfully -- to block his appointment. In October, Falk released his first report about the human rights situation in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
He received an invitation from Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas to study the situation in the West Bank, and his mission was authorized by the Geneva Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Falk left the United States on Friday and flew to Geneva, Switzerland, where he was joined by an assistant and a U.N. security detail. When the group arrived in Israel, the assistant and the security official were permitted to enter; however, Falk was detained at the airport, questioned and searched. He was informed that he would be denied entry, and was held for hours before being temporarily transported to some place beyond the airport (a VIP detention facility?).
The U.S. Embassy was alerted to this situation yesterday by Richard's wife, from California, after Richard made a quick call from the airport before going into an incommunicado situation. It took more than 12 hours for people to learn what Israel's plans were. to send him -- specifically, to send him to the United States, via Newark, on a flight scheduled to depart at 11:15 a.m. Israel time.
This is a situation that begs political and diplomatic intervention. In my view the incoming Obama Administration should, at minimum, issue a strong and unequivocal endorsement of Falk's status as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Palestine. Moreover, it should exert diplomatic pressure on Israel to grant him entry when he next seeks to travel to the country to pursue his U.N. mission.

Au revoir (presque) à Louise Arbour

Louise Arbour will step down from her position as U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights on June 30, thus concluding her 1st term in that position without seeking a 2d term.
Arbour (right) made the announcement yesterday, days after opening the current session in Geneva of of the Human Rights Council.
As did a recent predecessor in the position, former Irish President Mary Robinson (below), the Montreal-born Arbour (prior posts here) has called a number of countries on the carpet for pursuing policies that falls short of meeting international human rights obligations. They include China, Zimbabwe, and, the United States. Yesterday's N.Y. Times story wrote of her claim last year that

the so-called U.S. war on terror was eroding the worldwide ban on torture, noting reports of secret U.S. detention centers. John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time, said it was 'inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we're engaged in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers.'

The same story said that Arbour -- who, as we've posted, was the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia responsible for the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and who also is a former Justice on Canada's Supreme Court -- said that family concerns and not criticism drove her decision:

She acknowledged that she found much of the criticism hurtful, but she said she was not quitting because of it. 'On the contrary, I have to resist the temptation to stay to confront it.'

Here's hoping her successor's another feisty steward of international human rights.

On February 10, ...

... 1947, Louise Arbour (right) was born in Montréal, Canada. A professor at the Osgood Hall Law School, York University in Toronto, Canada, beginning in 1970, she became a judge in 1987, serving 1st at the Supreme Court of Ontario (High Court of Justice) and then at the Court of Appeal for Ontario. In 1996, the U.N. Security Council appointed her Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda; she resigned 3 years later to join Canada's Supreme Court. Since 2004 she has been U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Arbour made news Friday when she stated that "[t]he controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding and used by the United States qualifies as torture." Referring to the international arrest warrant issued in 1998 against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Arbour added that "[v]iolators of the U.N. Convention against Torture should be prosecuted under the principle of 'universal jurisdiction' which allows countries to try accused war criminals from other nations:

'There are several precedents worldwide of states exercising their universal jurisdiction ... to enforce the torture convention and we can only hope that we will see more and more of these avenues of redress.'

... 1952, the Congress Party won victory in India's 1st general election, a result that made its leader, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister.