Women's Human Rights

By Jackie Hansen, Major Campaigns and Women's Rights Campaigner, Amnesty Internatioanl Canada

Amnesty yellow mingled with the Women’s March on Washington’s signature pink toques at solidarity marches from St. John's to Victoria on Saturday, January 21. Amnesty supporters were amongst the 3+ million march participants worldwide. We marched against fear, hate, and in support of love, equality and justice. We marched for women’s rights and for LGBTI rights.

On inauguration day, many women and LGBTI people felt invisible in the president’s speech, erased from the White House’s list of policy priorities, and concerned about the potential impacts of new policies on civil liberties, the shrinking space for civil society, women’s rights, and LGBTI rights.

Amnesty campaigner Karen Javorski takes us inside one of El Salvador’s most notorious prisons to meet Teodora del Carmen Vásquez and María Teresa Rivera, women jailed after pregnancy complications.

Teodora shares a cell with 70 other women. For María Teresa, it is 250. Cramped together like this, the women often have to sleep on the floor under the building’s hot tin roofs.

This is Ilopango prison on the outskirts of San Salvador, capital of El Salvador. I’m here with my Amnesty colleagues, and our local partners, to visit Teodora del Carmen Vásquez and others from “Las 17”, a group of Salvadoran women who are in prison after suffering pregnancy-related complications.

The women speak to us in an outdoor area just beyond the prison patio– the only place we are allowed to enter. The heat is intense and the mosquitos swarm, but at least we can catch the breeze outside. Inside, as Teodora and María Teresa tell us, it’s a different story: severe overcrowding, intense heat and strict rules that are both impractical and cruel. And yet you wouldn’t know it from the building’s fairly nondescript exterior.

by Jackie Hansen, Women's Rights Campaigner, Amnesty International Canada Amnesty International Canada was a proud member of the Up for Debate campaign to promote women's rights and gender equality in the lead up to last week’s federal election. Our goal was to make sure that all federal political party leaders explained how they would build a more equal Canada for us all, and make meaningful commitments to change the lives of women and girls for the better at home and around the world. And we succeeded!

We shaped the debate: Our media outreach, social media engagement, and direct engagement with political parties and voters put women’s rights issues firmly on the election agenda, more than in previous election campaigns.

By Jackie Hansen, Women’s Rights Campaigner, Amnesty International Canada

I had great hopes for Thursday night’s Globe and Mail’s debate on Canada’s economy. After media attention surrounding the invisibility of women’s rights and gender equality issues in the federal election debate hosted last month by Maclean’s, and the flurry of media attention shortly thereafter around the failure of all federal political party leaders to agree to participate in a nationally broadcast leader’s debate on these issues, my expectations were high. Women’s rights and gender equality issues were on the radar!

Amnesty International has been in the news recently for our position on how to protect the human rights of sex workers of all genders (women, men, gender non-conforming). There’s been much confusion and misinformation in the media and on social media. So we wanted to set the record straight. Amnesty International is AGAINST: Human trafficking in all its forms Any sexual exploitation of children Violence and discrimination against sex workers Amnesty International is FOR: Protecting the fundamental human rights of every person on this planet, including sex workers, without discrimination Comprehensive measures to address social and economic inequalities that deny many people choices in how they earn a living Effective programs to support individuals who wish to leave sex work Enforcement of state obligations to end human trafficking and sexual exploitation of children, including providing support to victims Can you sum up what this is all about and what Amnesty is calling for?

By Jackie Hansen, Major Campaigns and Women’s Rights Campaigner

Watch this short video by Up for Debate supporters!

My number is 0. Zero is the number of times that women’s rights and gender equality were discussed in the Maclean’s debate on August 6, the first federal leader’s debate of the 11 week election campaign.

Zero is the number of times that ‘human rights’ were mentioned in the two-hour debate.

The word ‘woman’ was mentioned four times—three times in reference to women and men in the military, and once as a passing reference to a particular woman.

The debate focused on four thematic areas—the economy, environment, democracy, and foreign affairs/security. What were the missed opportunities to discuss women’s rights and gender equality? Here are some of the questions that could have been explored.

To mark the International Day of Action for Women’s Health on May 28, Paul Hunt, former UN expert on the right to health, tells us about one special girl who inspired his work.

About a decade ago, I travelled to the north of Uganda, still a conflict-zone at that time. Accompanied by soldiers, we went off the beaten track to a sprawling, dusty camp for internally displaced people (IDP).

There I met someone who symbolized the deep injustice that arises when health-rights are denied. About 14 years old, she was sitting outside her small hut where she lived with her family. Some of her limbs were huge and sharply disproportionate to the rest of her body. She was suffering from a severely disfiguring disease called lymphatic filariasis – commonly known as elephantiasis.

She explained that she went to school but was mocked and bullied. She could not stand the abuse so she left school. This teenage girl was the victim of multiple human rights abuses: of the rights to health, education, and equality.