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HRW: Yemen: No Justice for Past Abuses
Reforms Needed on Child Marriage, Women’s Rights
29.1.2015. (Sanaa) – Yemen’s government has not followed up on promises to take decisive measures to ensure justice for past human rights violations, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2015. The government should also pass legislation to end child marriage and female genital mutilation, and reform laws that discriminate against women.
FGM Change conference: Some thoughts on numbers and religion
28.1.2015. by Hannah Wettig (Stop FGM Middle East). One and a half hours into this European FGM conference organized by Terre des Femmes in Berlin, I know we have a lot of challenges in front of us. I haven’t heard the word “Asia” yet, but more than a dozen times “Africa”. This could just be due to the topic of this conference: “Promoting Change towards the abandonment of FGM in Practicing Communities across the EU” which sounds more universal than it is. It is actually about the change agent project supported by the European Union’s Daphne Program. Change agents are people from migrant communities who are promoting the abandonment of FGM within their communities. The designers of the project selected 17 countries where migrants from “practicing communities” come from – or at least this is what I heard on the conference, I can’t find it on the web later on. It seems like all of these 17 are in Africa. (more…)
Middle East Online: Egypt doctor gets 2 years in jail for fatal female circumcision
26.1.2015. CAIRO – An Egyptian appeals court on Monday sentenced a doctor to more than two years in jail for performing a female circumcision that killed a teenage girl, overturning an acquittal. A lower court in November had acquitted the doctor and the father of 14-year-old Sohair al-Bataa in the first such case brought to the courts since the procedure was banned in 2008.
Weekly Standard: Female Genital Mutilation a Growing Problem in Iran
20.1.2015. by Irfan Alawi and Stephen Schwartz
The hideous practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is neither an exclusively Muslim nor a principally Middle Eastern phenomenon. It exists among non-Muslims through wide areas of Africa.
But in Iraq and Iran, FGM is mainly associated with Kurds. The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, which is fighting against the terrorists of the so-called “Islamic State,” has pursued a substantive effort to eradicate FGM. As reported here, the KRG parliament introduced legislation prohibiting FGM in 2007. The law was passed in 2011 and forbade, additionally, child marriage, so-called “honor murders,” and other abuses suffered typically by women. In 2010, the KRG health ministry produced a plan to eliminate FGM and called on Islamic clergy to condemn the custom. (more…)
Combating FGM in Kurdistan: Some Statements of the Activists
18.01.2015; By Haje Keli, Wadi
As the activities of WADI against Female genital mutilation (FGM) in Iraqi Kurdistan enter another year in cooperation with local organizations and supported by UNICEF and HIVOS, a number of members of the various organizations collaborating on this effort have provided some feedback after about half a year of work on the project. (more…)
Yearly Report 2013-14
11.1.2015 by Stop FGM Middle East
Stop FGM Middle East was founded as a website and a small research project in early 2013 with the aim of making the existence of FGM in the Middle East and Asia outside of Africa public. In August 2013 we started working with a small team to bring together activists from the Middle East and push the issue on the agenda of international organizations, national governments, religious representatives, the media and non-governmental organizations.
Here is our public report of the first year of our work. (more…)
BBC reports in Persian about FGM in Kurdistan
9.1.2015. by Stop FGM Middle East. BBC Farsy (persian) broadcasted a report about female genital mutilation (FGM) in Iraqi Kurdistan and our work in Iraq, especially the TV campaign showing one of the new advertisements against FGM. This is a good start for a broader discussion about FGM in Iran where FGM is also prevalent in the provinces of Kurdistan, Western Azarbaijan, Kermanshah, Illam, Lorestan and Hormozghan. (more…)
Orchid Project: FGC in Iraqi Kurdistan
22.12.2014. by Orchid. On November 13th 2014, the Kurdish and Middle Eastern Women Organisation (KMEWO) held an event to promote their campaign titled ‘The Campaign: Stop FGM in Iraqi Kurdistan’. The event was held in correspondence with their annual general meeting, as KMEWO sought to bring together an array of people to discuss FGC in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Active since 1999, KMEWO seeks to promote issues that affect women, in particular regarding FGC; child and early forced marriage; honour killings, and domestic violence. They provide advice, hold education courses to teach women English and human rights, advocate to the government through lobbying and campaigning, and hold FGC awareness workshops across London. ‘The Campaign: Stop FGM in Iraqi Kurdistan’ is therefore only a branch of KMEWO’s work, however in the era of growing knowledge and awareness to FGC, they have decided to focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the practice. They subsequently held this event to share their knowledge and actively promote discussions on FGC in Iraqi-Kurdistan.
Iranian Film tackles Female Genital Mutilation
15.12.2014. By Stop FGM Middle East. The short film “Almond” tells the story of Awat a young Kurdish woman in Iran who is struggling with the consequences of female genital mutilation (FGM). When she has to marry, she stops talking entirely which soon becomes the main subject of the village talk. The director Mokhtar Masoumian spent six months to collect information about FGM in Iran, consulting and taking advice from experts and spend over 16 thousand dollars personally to realize the project. (more…)
FGM in Iran: Blade of Islam or patriarchal custom – an interview with scholars, activists and survivors
4.12.2014. by Stop FGM Middle East. The Iranian “Radio Farda” aired a 30-minutes special on female genital mutilation (FGM) happening in Iran on November 25th. It is the first time, that a radio in Iran tackles this topic and the journalist Roja Karimi Majd does so with great insight and her interviewees answer in remarkable openness. A mother who feels incredibly sad she had let this happen to her daughter says: “It ruins the life of people. Most divorces are because if this. Couples hate each other.” Her daughter talks about the effect it had on her last relationship: “When intercourse happened I could not show any reaction, I was cold. In the end my partner thought that he was the problem and this is how our relationship broke up.” The sociologist Rayehe Mozafarian explains why she calls it the blade of Islam while the activist Parvin Zabihi sees patriarchal society at the root.