'Nuff said

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

Nearby were framed photos of her idols: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These days, though, Karman is most inspired by her peers. 'Look at Egypt,' she said with pride. 'We will win.'

-- Reporter Sudarsan Raghavan, in yesterday's Washington Post profile of Tawakkol Karman (right). The head of an organization called Women Journalists Without Chains, she's using the internet to push for change in her native country of Yemen, site of unrest for the last several days. Karman's received death threats, been attacked by a mob, and detained by police for 38 hours. (photo credit)

Child marriage, abroad & at home

Pending in the U.S. House of Representatives is a bill to combat child marriage around world.
The International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010 (S. 987) unanimously passed the Senate 11 days ago. The bill finds, inter alia:

Child marriage, also known as 'forced marriage' or 'early marriage', is a harmful traditional practice that deprives girls of their dignity and human rights.

and:

Child marriage as a traditional practice, as well as through coercion or force, is a violation of article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, 'Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of intending spouses'.

Citing the frequency with which under-18 girls (girls in particular, though elsewhere the bill mentions boys, too) marry, in countries like "Niger, Chad, Mali, Bangladesh, Guinea, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, and Nepal," the bill would:
► Authorize the U.S. President to work with "multilateral, nongovernmental, and faith-based organizations" to develop a child-marriage-prevention strategy that includes "education, health, income generation, changing social norms, human rights, and democracy building"; and
► Require that information about the nature and prevalence of child marriage be included in the annual Country Reports published by the U.S. Department of State.
No word on when such legislation might be taken up in the House.
Movement in that direction received a notable boost last week, in a Washington Post op-ed published jointly by Mary Robinson (right), formerly the President of Ireland and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa, and winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. Members of The Elders group established by former the South African President and Nobel Peace Prizewinner, the 2 wrote:

As members of an independent group of leaders who were asked by Nelson Mandela to use our influence to address major causes of human suffering, we have never been involved in supporting a specific piece of legislation before, but we believe that investing in efforts to prevent child marriage is critical to global development and the achievement of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. We applaud the Senate for passing this forward-looking legislation and urge the House of Representatives to follow suit.

Against the backdrop of these recent legislative efforts, an item discovered in the Library of Congress archives jumped out.
A captivating account of early 20th C. "women's editions" published by the mainstream U.S. press included the Louisville Courier-Journal clipping at left, entitled "Black List of States". Listed was the legal limit "at which fathers, brothers, and husbands have placed the age at which a little girl may consent to her ruin" -- that is, the age at which she could become a child bride in the United States.
In all but 3 states (Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming), the age was under 18.
The youngest age of legal consent?
7 years, in Delaware.
The date?
1895, just 53 years before adoption of the Universal Declaration to which the pending legislation refers.

On October 26

On this day in ...
... 1986, the government of South Africa threw out of the country Swiss nationals who were working for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The move came a day after South African delegates had been expelled from an ICRC conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The New York Times commented that South African had been kicked out of the ICRC meeting in an effort "to protest apartheid." But it speculated that the vote "could have the unintended effect of hurting opponents of apartheid," given that the workers ordered to leave had been visiting anti-apartheid campaigners "jailed for such crimes as treason and terrorism," among them "the black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela." (credit for photo of Mandela's cell at the prison on Robben Island, where the future South African President was incarcerated from 1964 to 1982.) The following month, South Africa reversed the expulsion order.

(Prior October 26 posts are here, here, and here.)

Guest Blogger: Bonita Meyersfeld

It is IntLawGrrls great pleasure to welcome Bonita Meyersfeld (left) as today's guest blogger. Bonita is an associate professor of law at the University of Witwatersrand School of Law in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also the head of gender at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies and an editor on the South African Journal on Human Rights. Bonita teaches international law, business and human rights and, prior to working in South Africa, was a legal advisor in the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. Bonita obtained her LLB from Wits Law School and her LLM and JSD from Yale Law School and was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
Bonita has written, lectured and presented in Africa, the United States, Canada and Europe in the areas of international human rights law, transitional justice, women’s rights, business and human rights and development.
Bonita has worked as a litigator and legal advisor, advising South African governmental departments on developmental projects, particularly regarding water and gas distribution. She has also worked as gender consultant to the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York and as a legal consultant at Interights in London.
In her guest post below, Bonita blogs today on her excellent new book, Domestic Violence and International Law, which is part of a larger body of her work focusing on intimate systemic violence and international law.
Bonita has selected Helen Suzman (below right, with Nelson Mandela) (credit) as her IntLawGrrls foremother:

I would like to dedicate this blog to Helen Suzman, anti-apartheid activist and politician. Ms Suzman, who died in January 2009, was a rare personality whose commitment to justice and intellectual integrity found her alone in parliament fighting the battle of racial equality against the apartheid government in South Africa. Ms Suzman’s work is notable for being robust at a time when equality and human rights were not popular concepts. She pursued her line of work in the face of personal danger, political opposition and social approbation. The demise of apartheid is due in no small part to her work.

Guest Blogger: Gay McDougall

It's IntLawGrrls' immense honor to welcome Gay McDougall (right), the United Nations' Independent Expert on Minorities, as today's guest blogger.
Gay was appointed to serve in that post for a 6-year term in 2005. From 2006 until 2008, she also held an appointment as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, D.C. (home institution of IntLawGrrls). From 1994 to 2006, Gay was the Executive Director of the human rights advocacy group Global Rights, leading the development and implementation of programs in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas.

Gay was the 1st American to serve on the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the U.N. treaty body that oversees the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. While in that position, she drafted and sponsored for adoption General Recommendation No. 25: Gender related dimensions of racial discrimination. From 1997 to 2000 she was a member of the U.N. Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, and was U.N. Special Rapporteur on the issue of systematic rape, sexual slavery, and slavery-like practices in armed conflict. In the latter capacity she presented to the United Nations a then-groundbreaking study that called for international legal standards for the prosecution of acts of systematic rape and sexual slavery committed during armed conflict.
In 1994, she was appointed the only American member of the 16-member 1994 Electoral Commission of South Africa, which organized the process that resulted in the election of President Nelson Mandela. For the previous 14 years, she'd worked with South African lawyers for the release of thousands of political prisoners. Gay also founded the Commission on Independent Elections that monitored Namibia’s transition to democracy.
Gay earned her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1972 and her LL.M. from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1978. She holds honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Georgetown University Law Center and the City University of New York Law School.
Among her many honors is a 1999 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, awarded on account of what the foundation called her “innovative” work in international human rights.
In her guest post below, Gay discusses her work as the United Nations' expert on minorities, about which IntLawGrrls earlier posted here, here, and here.
Heartfelt welcome!

On February 2

On this day in ...
... 1897, 23-year-old Clara Brett Martin (right) was called to the bar in Ontario, Canada. The 1st woman to receive a law degree from the University of Toronto thus became the 1st woman lawyer in the British Empire. The Toronto Telegram reported on her swearing-in as a barrister thusly:

She wore a black gown over a black dress and the regulation white tie and bore her honours modestly.

Both Martin's fearlessness and foibles are detailed here. (image credit)
... 1990, in a televised speech at Cape Town, South African President F.W. de Klerk rescinded a 3-decade-old ban on the African National Congress (logo at left), the country's "leading anti-apartheid group." De Klerk also suggested that he might some day release the group's imprisoned leader, Nelson Mandela -- as indeed he did 9 days later.

A Tribute to Helen Suzman

Helen Suzman, a lion of the anti-apartheid movement, died peacefully at her home in Johannesburg yesterday at the age of 91. South Africa's flags will fly at half-mast on Sunday to mourn her passing, a fitting tribute to an "indomitable" and "stroppy" "powerhouse against apartheid", in the words of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Suzman, a member of South Africa's Parliament from the wealthy Johannesburg district of Houghton from 1953 until 1989, used her position to fight tirelessly against apartheid, often as a sole dissenting voice -- the "cricket in the thorn tree", as she was known. She served thirteen years as the sole liberal MP, six of those as the only female amongst 165 male MPs. Despite these daunting circumstances, Suzman continually stood up for justice and equality:

Helen's reputation was built not on lofty thoughts and resounding speeches, but on hard work. One by one, as they came off the assembly line, she shredded the bills that removed civil liberties. One by one, she tore her parliamentary colleagues apart for their callousness, ignorance and ineptitude. Day after day, she would meet the poor, either in her office, or more often in their own shacks, listening to their tales of sorrow and sadness, of hurt and hatred.

With typical chutzpah, she would accost ministers in the parliamentary lobby or beard police officers in their dens, and demand to know why some nameless person of colour was being deprived of his or her rights.

In Suzman's own words, "I am provocative, and I admit this. It isn't as if I'm only on the receiving end, a poor, frail little creature. I can be thoroughly nasty when I get going, and I don't pull my punches." The world will be a poorer place without those punches, though Suzman's fighting spirit will continue to inspire us to speak out against injustice and agitate for change.

Thank you, Miriam

As a child of the 1980s, I first heard the music of Miriam Makeba (left) after she performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland tour, but she became a household name when she appeared on the Cosby Show in 1991.

Her music is still a part of my daily life. "Pata Pata," Makeba's best-known hit (1967 video performance at the bottom of this post), happens to be a fabulous cha-cha. My dance partner and I have it in our favorite warm-up mix, and often argue about the song's interpretation. While it is a truly "fun" song, we disagree because she is actually listening to the music -- the playful, bouncing melody -- and I am listening to Makeba's struggle underlying it. I lose the argument every time, but Makeba's music truly expresses a myriad of emotions. As Nelson Mandela put it following Makeba's death last week:

Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.

While Makeba resisted being called an activist, she became a symbolic voice for the struggle against apartheid. Born in Johannesburg in 1932, Makeba began her singing career blending jazz and traditional South African music in the 1950s. In 1959, after starring in anti-apartheid documentary Come-back Africa, the regime revoked Makeba's citizenship. Thrust into exile, Makeba spent the following 31 years living between the United States, Guinea and Europe. Americans were comfortable with Makeba when her politics concerned South Africa. In 1963, during a period when her career flourished in the United States, Makeba testified without incident before the United Nations about the situation in her homeland, saying "the time had come for all mankind to act with firmness to stop those mad rulers from dragging the country into a horrifying disaster." But when Makeba married Stokely Carmichael, a black activist working with the leaders of the American civil rights movement, the American public turned their backs on her, despite Makeba's assertions that the relationship was not political. Her bookings were cancelled and her career ended in the United States -- until South Africa became a hot topic in the 1980s.

In a seeming dual exile, Makeba went to Guinea. She served as the country's UN Representative and won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986 for her work in this position. After another move, this time to Belgium, Makeba was finally able to return home to South Africa in 1990.

A citizen of the world, yet a citizen of nowhere, Makeba insisted:

I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can't do anything about that.

This world, that punished her during most of her life for that truth, will always be indebted to her for it.

Afriqueries Answered

Answers to the IntLawGrrls puzzler above, "Afriqueries," put together courtesy of an African Union webpage:

a) 3 of the 18 Nobel laureates are women: Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Muta Mathaai (right; prior IntLawGrrls posts) and South African author Nadine Gordimer (left), and from the African diaspora, the American author Toni Morrison (below left; prior post).

b) 10 of the 18 won the Peace Prize. From Africa itself, they are (in addition to Mathaai, introduced in (a) above): International Atomic Energy Agency leader Mohamed ElBaradei of Egypt (prior post), former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (prior posts), former South African Presidents Nelson Mandela (prior posts) and F.W. de Klerk, the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (prior posts), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (prior post), and the late South African anti-apartheid leader Albert John Lutuli. From the African diaspora, 2 Americans, the late diplomat Ralph Bunche (prior post) and the late civil rights activist Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (prior posts).

c) The other fields of achievement are Literature, with 6 prizewinners from Africa and its diaspora, and Chemistry and Economics, each with 1 African prizewinner.

Liberty, Equality and Sanity

In a nation founded on the principles of liberty and equality, one might expect our immigration laws to reflect both of these ideals, as well as at least a modicum of sanity. The laws might, for example, protect individuals seeking liberty and treat equally those applying to immigrate. Unfortunately, that's often not the approach taken by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), but we've seen two major developments this month that have inched our immigration laws slightly closer to these goals. On the liberty front, on July 1, President Bush signed into law H.R. 5690, a bill exempting members of the African National Congress from being treated as members of a "terrorist organization" -- a label that would, under current immigration law, render an individual ineligible for entry into the United States. While Nelson Mandela (90 years old today; see post below) and his comrades must be breathing easier, the astounding breadth of the definition of "terrorist activity" in the Immigration and Nationality Act still captures plenty of freedom fighters and innocent victims of terrorist groups, as further explained here.
And on the equality front, on Wednesday, as part of the reauthorization of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the Senate voted to end the travel ban levied against HIV positive individuals wishing to visit the United States. This bill also boosts spending on HIV/AIDS relief from $15 billion to $48 billion over 5 years (pending appropriations), increases the number of health care professionals working on HIV/AIDS, and eliminates the abstinence earmark that required one-third of all prevention funds go to abstinence-only programs. Notably, Section 203 "recognizes the need to expand the range of interventions for preventing the transmission of HIV, including non-vaccine prevention methods that can be controlled by women." Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic reports that the Senate sponsors will probably avoid a conference with the House and send the bill straight to the President for signature. According to Immigration Equality, the HIV travel ban was first introduced in 1987 and codified in 1993 at the behest of Senator Jesse Helms, a longtime foe of human rights advocates. It led to the first Guantanamo controversy, over the quarantine of HIV-positive Haitians, as well as a boycott of the United States as a forum for international HIV/AIDS conferences. Here's hoping that sane minds prevail, and that the HIV travel ban will soon be a relic of immigration laws past.

On July 18

On this day in ...
... 1918 (90 years ago today) , Nelson Mandela (right) was born in Transkei, South Africa. The exceptional life of this man (mentioned too in post above) -- from lawyer to prisoner to President to global campaigner for humanity -- is set out here, in a BBC slide-show-with-soundtrack.
... 1985, Rozanne L. Ridgway (below left) was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs, making her the 1st woman to head a regional bureau of the U.S. State Department. She held the post until mid-1989. Ridgway also was the 1st woman Counselor of the Department of State, serving from 1980-81, and held numerous other diplomatic posts. Now 72 years old, she serves on the boards of directors of many U.S. corporations.

Write On! Tribute to Judge Pillay

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.) Our colleague William A. Schabas of the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway is assembling a book of essays on international law in honor of Navanethem Pillay (below right), who, as we've posted, is the former President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and now serves as an Appeals Chamber Judge at the International Criminal Court.
In a call for papers, Schabas notes that Pillay served on the panels of the ICTR (logo at bottom left) in 2 landmark judgments:
► Prosecutor v. Akayesu (1998) established sexual violence as an international crime and interpreted genocide's protected groups requirement so as to include the Tutsi group that suffered most during the Rwanda massacres. (I've written about the decision here and here.)
►Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza and Ngeze (2003), also known as the Media Case, "which held that persons who use the media to incite genocide and other international crimes may be held accountable for their crimes, without detriment to the proper exercise of free speech."
Pillay's fight against impunity began well before the international tribunals formed, in South Africa, where she represented many whom the apartheid regime had imprisoned at Robben Island, the penal site where Nelson Mandela was held for 18 years.
The call for papers welcomes manuscripts of 5,000-8,000 (including requisite introductory abstract) in any of these areas:
► public international law
► international criminal law
► international humanitarian law
► international human rights law
► apartheid and international law
► women and international law
► racism and international law
► Africa and international law
► international law and the municipal constitutional order
Interested persons should submit an abstract of 1 page or less, accompanied by a brief biography, by July 31, 2008. Papers themselves are due September 30, 2008. All should be submitted to editorial assistant Gloria Otieno at otienog@un.org; editorial policy or related questions may be directed to Chile Eboe-Osuji at eboe-osuji@un.org or Roland Adjovi at adjovi@un.org.

On January 31, ...

... 2007, Adelaide Tambo (below), South African anti-apartheid activist, died at age 77 at her home in Johannesburg. According to her African National Congress biography:

Her political life started at the age of 10 after a police raid following a riot in Top Location, in which a police officer had been killed. Tambo's ailing grandfather, aged 82, was among those arrested and marched to the town square. Here the old man collapsed.
'I sat with him until he regained consciousness,' Tambo recalled in an interview. 'The way those young policemen pushed him around and called him 'boy' decided me. I swore I would fight them till the end.'

She spent much of her life in exile along with her husband, Oliver Tambo. During this time she was based in London and served as the ANC's a founder of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement and the Pan-African Women's Organisation. The couple returned to South Africa in 1990; Oliver died 3 years later. Upon the death of the woman known as "Ma Tambo" or "Mama Adelaide, "South Africa's 1st post-apartheid President, Nelson Mandela, "who shared her birthday, said he mourned the 'passing away of a close personal friend, a comrade and one of the great heroines of our nation.'"
... 1865, with negotiations under way to end the 4-year-old Civil War, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery by a vote of 113 to 58. The New York Times wrote of this step toward ratification,

the enthusiasm of all present, save a few disappointed politicians, knew no bounds, and for several moments the scene was grand and impressive beyond description. No attempt was made to suppress the applause which came from all sides, every one feeling that the occasion justified the fullest expression of approbation and joy.

The 13th Amendment -- one of IntLawGrrls' Legal Wonders of the World -- would take effect in December of the same year.

On November 18, ...

... 1967 (40 years ago today), movement of farm animals was banned throughout England and Wales, and an international motorsport rally set to begin in London was canceled, as Britain strove to contain the worst epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease since 1923. Nearly half a million pigs, cattle, and other livestock would be slaughtered before the outbreak, which lasted 32 weeks and "is thought to have been transmitted from infected meat legally imported into the country from Argentina and legally introduced into the animal food chain," could be contained. (photo courtesy of the BBC)
... 1993, nearly 2 dozen leaders, among them F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, gave approval to a new South African Constitution. Containing an expansive Bill of Rights and providing for an end to apartheid-created "homelands" after the holding of elections in spring 1994, that document has been named an IntLawGrrls Legal Wonder of the World. (Still welcoming Legal Wonder nominees, incidentally.)

On September 26, ...

... 2007 (today), celebrate the 7th annual European Day of Languages. The Council of Europe set aside the day to "alert the public to the importance of language learning," "increase awareness and appreciation of all languages," and "encourage lifelong language learning" -- goals that ought to extend beyond that 1 continent. Indeed, they do: counted among the 307 languages of the European Community ("20 of which have over 2000 speakers") are languages like "Japanese which for a majority of students may, in fact, be second rather than first languages." Join the festivities, perhaps by taking this Council quiz, or curling up with a copy of An Béal Bocht, Saga af bláum sumri, or the like.

... 1936, Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was born in a village in what was then called Transkei and is now the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. She received a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Upon becoming politically active in the anti-apartheid movement, she was 1st detained in 1958, the same year she married African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela (left). Thereafter she was frequently subjected to detention and banning orders, as well as 5 years' imprisonment. After her husband's release from prison in 1990, allegations of misconduct by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela surfaced. The couple were divorced in 1996; thereafter, she was convicted of fraud, though a 4-year prison sentence was suspended in 2004.

On August 5, ...

... 1929, Millicent Garrett Fawcett (left) died in London at age 82, following a long career as a campaigner for the rights of women in England. Her approach was deemed "constitutionalist," less "militant" than that of her suffragist contemporary, Emmeline Pankhurst. Yet when Fawcett, wife of Henry Fawcett, a Cambridge economics professor and Member of Parliament, "gave a speech advocating suffrage in 1868, some in Parliament denounced her action as especially inappropriate, they said, for the wife of an MP." The organization that Millicent Fawcett founded established an archive of suffrage materials; it survives today as the London Women's Library.
...1962 (45 years ago today), Nelson Mandela was arrested in Natal province, South Africa, and imprisoned. He would not be released until 1990. In 1993, he won the Nobel Peace Prize; in 1994, he was elected the 1st President of the post-apartheid Republic of South Africa.