Mission & Justice

Najah Alosaimi; 28/8/08

Manal Al-Quais, a 23-year-old Saudi, won a scholarship from the King Abdullah Scholarship Program to study nursing in Canada. There’s only one problem: She can’t find a close male relative to go with her for the entire duration of the study; they have their own families and responsibilities to attend to. Recently, two key governmental departments have initiated a debate on how women in Manal’s situation can take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s national scholarship program. The Higher Education Ministry will not lift the requirement that these students bring a guardian (a close male relative or husband) in order to study abroad, while the governmental Human Rights Commission (HRC) disagrees on the importance of the “mahram” accompanying the students.

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Maggie Farley; 26/7/08

The colour of Navanethem Pillay’s skin stopped her becoming a judge in apartheid South Africa. The new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, South African judge Navanethem Pillay, has spent a lifetime quietly toppling barriers and exceeding expectations. So when human rights groups and some American officials expressed scepticism before her appointment on Thursday, she said she was used to it. As someone from a poor Indian neighbourhood in apartheid-era South Africa, the colour of her skin long kept her from becoming a judge. For years, even though she was a lawyer, she could not even sign a contract without her husband’s consent.

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Josephine Smare, 20/7/08

Small Enterprise Development Project Coordinator with the Adventist Development Relief Agency (ADRA) PNG will depart Port Moresby today (July 18) to attend an East West Center Program in Honolulu, Hawaii. She will participate in the “Changing Faces Women’s Leadership Program, a leadership development program for women from the United States and the Asia Pacific region. In a region experiencing a wide range of low-and high-intensity conflicts the assertion that conflict is unavoidable certainly rings true. The real choice then, lies in how to confront, analyse, and respond to conflict in a way that moves society forward toward positive change. The importance of women’s participation in peace-building, security decision-making, and conflict transformation, has been most clearly put forth in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in the year 2000: “stressing the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security, and the need to increase their role in decision-making with regard to conflict prevention and resolution.”

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Ronald P. Sokol; 24/7/08

Moroccan-born Faiza Mabchour speaks French fluently, has three children born in France, and a French husband. Yet France’s top administrative court last month denied her bid for citizenship. The reason? Mabchour wears a burqa, a long veil that some Muslim women use to cover themselves from head to toe. In an interview with officials, she said she wore the burqa not for any special religious belief but because her husband asked her to. A government report stated that “she lives in total submission to the men of her family, and the notion of questioning this submission does not even occur to her”. The court said such a radical religious practice is incompatible with fundamental French values such as the equality of the sexes; thus, she was judged unable to assimilate - a must for citizenship.

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James Button; 25/7/08

The case is the talk of France. The highest administrative court has denied a woman citizenship because she wears a burqa, the head-to-toe covering that shows only the eyes, sometimes not even them. Faiza Silmi, a 32-year-old Moroccan who lives on a housing estate south of Paris, said she applied for citizenship because she wanted to be like her husband, Karim, a Frenchman of Moroccan background, and their four children. But on June 27 the State Council denied her request on the grounds of “insufficient assimilation”. In the name of religious radicalism, the court said, she had adopted a practice “incompatible with the essential values of the French community — notably the principle of equality of the sexes”.

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Yuval Azoulay; 24/7/08

The Israel Defense Forces’ head of Halacha (Jewish Law) has said that religious soldiers should be exempt from participating in army ceremonies that include appearances by female singers. Rabbi Maj. Menachem Perle’s stated this after a female singer from the army band sang a number of songs at a rehearsal for the final ceremony for a course of soldiers from the Kfir infantry brigade, which includes the religious Nahal Haredi battalion and a number of platoons of students from Jewish seminaries. One of the soldiers present at the ceremony later posted a question to the military rabbi via the Web site Yeshiva, asking if it was permissible by Jewish law to remain in the audience during the appearance of the female singer. He also pointed out that a number of religious soldiers had left the hall when the female singer came up to the stage during the ceremony. Perle said the prohibition on listening to female singers was based on the halachic ruling that kol haisha arve (the voice of a woman is shameful, or sexual).

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Rana Husseini; 23/7/08

A pioneering study mapping women’s empowerment in Jordan revealed that Karak and Madaba lead the Kingdom’s governorates in the percentage of economically active women. The study also indicated that the governorates of Zarqa and Irbid scored the least percentages of women in this category. The study, conducted by the Department of Statistics (DoS) aimed at shedding light on the levels and variations in women’s empowerment across the Kingdom’s 12 governorates as well as progress during 2004-2007. The study’s findings were unveiled at a press conference yesterday at the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation, attended by female senators, members of Parliament, the secretary general of the Jordan National Committee for Women and the National Council for Family Affairs, as well as representatives of civil society organisations and women’s groups in Jordan.

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Haya Al-Manie; 22/7/08

Local newspapers have recently published stories of women driving on the Kingdom’s roads, something that led me to ask why they try to drive when they do not know how to. Since some of these women have ended up in terrible accidents, I’m led to ask whether there was a real need for them to drive, or were they just trying to show off. Maybe some of these young women were looking for adventure. The incidence of women driving may indicate a coming social change, which supports the theory of officials that the decision to allow women to drive must come from the community, not from the government. I am not going to argue about the right of women to drive, especially for families with extenuating circumstances.

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Shahar Ilan; 21/7/08

A senior Knesset official on Monday said fear of offending ultra-Orthodox MKs led the institution to exclude women singers from the parliamentary choir at a special session in honor of visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown earlier in the day. Two-thirds of the Knesset choir, headed by MK Zevulun Orlev (National Union-National Religious Party Chairman), were missing when the national anthem Hatikva was performed at the afternoon session. Director-general of the Knesset, Avi Balashnikov, told Haaretz that the decision to leave out the female members of the choir was made in order to accommodate all MKs. “I am the director-general of all MKs, and I don’t have any wish to cause situations that would make MKs get up and leave,” Balashnikov said. “Even though there are only a few Haredi MKs, we think of everybody…This can be seen in the fact that the Knesset kiosk is strictly kosher.”

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20/7/08

Three women are to be ordained as priests Sunday here in one of American’s most Catholic cities, but they will face automatic excommunication by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. The trio is to be ordained in a ceremony performed by a woman at a Protestant church affiliated to the US Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ, in Boston’s first female ordination. The move has angered the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, which has sent out an email to local priests reminding them of Vatican law that women are allowed to have key roles within the church, but cannot become priests.

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