Women who have stood up for change across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) this year, despite a plethora of abuse from governments and armed groups, Amnesty International said yesterday.
Paying tribute to female activists in a report released on Human Rights Day, Amnesty said that they had been “at the center of compelling stories of hard-won change.”
Women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and the Palestinian territories had taken part in protest movements “and felt the backlash of authorities’ anxieties about those challenging the status quo,” it said.
Amnesty International said that 66 female human rights defenders had been detained this year in Iran, 14 in Saudi Arabia and three in Egypt.
“From successfully campaigning to lift the driving ban in Saudi Arabia to protesting against Iran’s abusive and degrading practice of forced hijab, women across the MENA region have been standing up,” said Heba Morayef, the rights group’s director for the region.
“In the process they often risk arrest and detention,” Morayef said.
Amnesty singled out “the outrageous arrest of Amal Fathy amongst many other women activists” in Egypt.
She had been “arbitrarily imprisoned since May simply for posting a video online speaking about her experience of sexual harassment and criticising the Egyptian government for neglecting survivors,” it said.
In the Palestinian territories, rights advocate Suha Jbara had described “how she was tortured by her interrogators in the Palestinian security forces over the course of three days in November.”
She said she had been “beaten, slammed against a wall and threatened with sexual violence, as well as punished for going on hunger strike.”
Philip Luther, Amnesty’s MENA research and advocacy director, gave a positive balance for the gains of women in the region.
“Despite the shortfall in international pressure, the hard-won gains of women human rights defenders in this and previous years raise hopes that more change is on the horizon,” Luther said.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of