Guest Blogger: Aziza Ahmed

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Aziza Ahmed (right) as today's guest blogger.
Project Manager/Research Associate for the Boston-based Program on International Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, from which she earned an M.S. degree Population and International Health, Aziza works on issues of HIV/AIDS, gender, sexuality, sexual and reproductive health and rights, violence against women, and the intersection of criminal law and public health. In her guest post below, she underscores the disparate impact on women of the trend toward laws permitting criminal punishment for HIV transmission.
Before working at Harvard's health and human rights program, Aziza was a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow with the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS. Amongst other projects, she helped launch a project on the forced and coerced sterilization of HIV positive women in Namibia. Aziza, who aholds a J.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, also has served as a consultant to UNIFEM and UNICEF in the Eastern Caribbean, and has worked with several women’s health and rights organizations in Southern Africa, India, the United States, and the Caribbean.

Heartfelt welcome!

U.N. set to create new women's entity

The General Assembly of the United Nations voted Monday in favor of a draft resolution consolidating all U.N. agencies and divisions addressing women's issues into a single entity.
Called for is the amalgamation of the following:
► the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues (OSAGI);
► the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW);
► the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM); and
► the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW).
The move was partly driven by the lack of a centralized voice for gender issues in the U.N. labyrinth. As Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated:

'U.N. gender architecture lacks a recognized driver. It is fragmented. It is inadequately funded, and insufficiently focused on country-driven demands.'

To remedy such fragmentation and underfunding, the entity is expected to have a budget of approximately $ 1 billion and its own Under Secretary-General, who will report directly to the Secretary-General.

Tasks for the entity are much less clear. The draft resolution only states that the consolidation will "take into account the existing mandates" of the agencies to be merged.

Last-minute opposition to the resolution by member states such as Cuba, Egypt, Iran and Sudan allegedly resulted in the absence of a specific mandate for the composite entity -- an absence that led Oxfam to label such opposition "deplorable." Secretary-General Ban needs quickly to draft a mission statement, organizational chart, funding plan, and executive board proposal for General Assembly approval.

The consolidation initiative first had been proposed amid discussions about U.N. reform, which began during the tenure of former Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Advocacy around this week's resolution was led by a group called Gender Equity Architecture Reform. GEAR now is pressing for the timely appointment of an under secretary-general for the entity as well as full funding.

Guest Blogger: Susan Harris Rimmer

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome Dr. Susan Harris Rimmer (left) as a guest blogger.
Susan is a Research Officer at the Centre for International Governance and Justice (prior post), where she works with IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Hilary Charlesworth, Centre Director, on the building of democracy after conflict. Susan graduated from the University of Queensland in 1997 with a bachelor' degree in government and an LL.B., both with honors, having received a University Medal in 1996. In December 2008 she earned a Doctor of Juridical Science from the Australian National University College of Law for her thesis, which Routledge will publish as Gender and Transitional Justice: The Women of East Timor in 2010. In 2006 the University of Texas School of Law awarded Susan the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on the Human Rights of Women.
Susan currently serves as a member of the Board of UNIFEM Australia and is President of the Australian Lawyers for Human Rights.
Her career before entering academia was diverse. After some volunteer work with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Susan did her articles of clerkship with national law firm Blake Dawson Waldron, and was admitted as a solicitor in March 2000. Since then, Susan has pursued human rights and refugee advocacy work with the National Council of Churches in Australia, the Australian Council for International Development, and the UNHCR. From 2005 until 2008, Susan was a Research Specialist at the Parliamentary Library, advising Australia's Federal Parliamentarians on legal issues relating to refugees and terrorism.
In her guest post below, Susan describes the continuing struggle, by women in post-independence East Timor, against sexual and gender-based violence.
Susan dedicates her post to Shirley Perry Smith (1924-1998), better known as Mum Shirl (below right). Susan explains:

Mum Shirl was a prominent Aboriginal Australian and activist committed to justice and welfare of Aboriginal Australians. Smith began to visit Aboriginal people in prison after one of her brothers was incarcerated, and she discovered that her visits were beneficial to other prisoners as well. Her community activism also saw her accompanying indigenous people who were unfamiliar with the legal system to court when they had been charged with a crime. Her nickname came from her habit of replying, 'I’m his Mum,' whenever officials queried her relationship with the prisoners.
Mum Shirl also spent considerable time and money finding homes for children whose parents could not look after them, and helping displaced children to find their own parents again. The children with nowhere to go often ended up living with her. By the early 1990s she had raised over 60 children. Likewise, many people with no family or friends in Sydney arrived at Mum Shirl’s house seeking shelter.
She was a founding member of the Aboriginal Legal Service, Aboriginal Medical Service, Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the Aboriginal Children’s Service, and the Aboriginal Housing Company in Redfern, a suburb of Sydney, Australia.

Today Smith joins other IntLawGrrls foremothers in the list below our "visiting from ..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

On July 20, ...

... 1979, in Nicaragua, Sandinista rebels established a government, having overthrown the U.S.-backed government of President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who'd sought refuge in the United States a few days earlier. The Sandinistas would hold power for a decade marked by armed opposition from U.S.-aided Contras. On the role of Nicaraguan women during this period -- among them poet Daisy Zamora (above), see the 2005 UNIFEM publication, Guerra NO: Mujeres en la Conquista de la Paz en Guatemala, El Salvador y Nicaragua
... 1936, U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) was born in Baltimore.