2003 child prisoner, Delara Darabi, executed in Iran

Women News Network – WNN – Friday 1 May, 2009

Delara Darabi. Image: AIUK

Delara Darabi, a woman prisoner jailed under a questionable case in Iran prison in 2003 since the age of 17, has just been executed this morning by hanging in Rasht Central Prison.

Darabi’s case has raised much opposition, international outrage and protest during her 2007 retrial. Details on the case that may have saved Darabi’s life were not admitted in the retrial. Both parents have admitted that Delara was left handed. Case evidence required that the killer must have been right handed.

According to Amnesty International reports, Delara confessed to the murder of a relative at the age of 17. Later she retracted her admission, saying she was trying to protect her boyfriend from receiving the punishment. At the time she expected her young age would sway the courts in a positive direction.

“Amnesty International is outraged at the execution of Delara Darabi, and particularly at the news that her lawyer was not informed about the execution, despite the legal requirement that he should receive 48 hours’ notice,” said Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa Programme Deputy Director Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui. “This indicates that even decisions by the Head of the Judiciary carry no weight and are disregarded in the provinces,” continued Sahraoui.

Out of 140 executions thus far for 2009, Darabi is the second woman and the second child offender who has been executed by Iran judicial order this year. Since 1990, 42 child cases have resulted in execution in Iran.

For more information on this case see:

AIUK – Amnesty International UK report: “Iran: Outrage at execution of child offender Delara Darabi”

Shahrzad News You Tube: May 16, 2007 video release

AIUK blogger report: “Delara Darabi’s death: shocking news”

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WNN news release May 1, 2009

Climate-related disasters widen the road to slavery

Lisa Friedman – The New York Times – Mon 30 March, 2009

SATKHIRA, Bangladesh — The stench of the kerosene lamp fills the space under the roadway overpass. Two girls and their nephew, mother and father make their home here. They sit on a wide slab of concrete covered with a cloth mat that serves as their bed.

Sheik Zapharula’s face glows in the lamplight as he recounts how his 15-year-old daughter was lured off by an admiring stranger who had been coming by the family’s rooti store. It was only years later that they learned the worst of it: that within days, the girl had been hustled illegally across the border into India and sold into slavery.

Zapharula’s family is among the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh. Not only landless and jobless, they lack even the community structure of village life. Aid workers say it’s families like this one in Bangladesh and elsewhere that are most vulnerable to exploitation. Climate change, meanwhile, threatens to thrust millions more families into desperate conditions. . .

. . . read complete article . . .
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Pakistan’s Mukhtar Mai Marries–But Why?

Elisabeth Eaves – Forbes digital news – Friday 20 March, 2008

Stories about heroes are never as simple as they seem.

Mukhtar Mai became a global hero after she was gang-raped in 2002 on the orders of a village council, as punishment for an alleged offense committed by her brother. Rather than committing suicide, as would have been traditional for a rape victim in her farming village in Pakistan’s Punjab, she successfully fought her attackers in court, then used the compensation money to open schools and a women’s aid group.

Her story captured attention around the world. The barbarity of the details surrounding her case (her 12-year-old brother’s “crime” was that he himself had been molested), her unwillingness to stay silent, and her determination to subsequently do some good has fired imaginations, leading to an influx of funds for her schools, help from international human rights groups, meetings with foreign dignitaries, and publication of an autobiography and a biography. There’s even a Hollywood biopic in the works. . .

. . . read complete article . . .
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Enough from the men!

Wahat al-Salam Neve Shalom (Oasis of Peace Israel) – Maram Masarwi- 5 Jan, 2009

Maram Masarwi is a longterm resident of Wahat al-Salam - Neve Shalom.

ISRAEL: The appalling scenes on television have left some of us dumbfounded. What is happening in Gaza is a human tragedy and a war crime beyond comprehension. Another killing campaign from Barak’s death factory: “Cast Lead.” Evidently the stock of heroic phrases in the songs of the Maccabees was not enough for Barak, since he felt obliged to lay his pianist’s hands on a poem for children by Bialik, who is turning over in his grave at the crude brutality of using a classic children’s poem as the name for this bloody struggle. Such a gross incursion from the adult world – Cast Lead – into the innocent world of children is only one part of the masculine discourse that knows no boundaries, neither territorial nor national. Perhaps Barak was thinking about some particularly horrible revenge. If once they measured an eye for an eye, Barak, Olmert and Livni now weigh the lives of 300 Palestinians against the disruption of daily life among residents of southern Israel.

Indeed if we are dealing with a war, then once again the men are marching out in front, both on the battlefield and in the parade of commentators across our television screens. And once again the women – mothers and wives – are conspicuously absent from the decision-making process and banished from any chance of influencing the intolerable reality unfolding before us. We women are not bombing anyone from the skies above Gaza and we are certainly not launching missiles toward Sderot. . .

. . . read complete article . . .
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NEPAL: Fighting back against the child widow taboo

IRIN humanitarian news – Tuesday 30 Dec, 2008

The stigma of being a widow in Nepal can be overwhelming, even more so when you are young

RAJBIRAJ, 30 December 2008 (IRIN) – At the age of 11 Purni Shah was forced by her family to marry a 25-year-old man. Four years into the marriage, her husband died leaving her a child widow.

Her fate is not uncommon in Nepal, which has one of world’s highest levels of child marriage, according to Nepal’s Demographic Health Survey. Over 63 percent of girls marry before 18, and 7 percent marry before reaching 10, the survey said.

But for those who become widows, the stigma can be overwhelming: They are often looked upon with disdain and suspicion, and even blamed for their husband’s death. . .

. . . read complete article . . .
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