Mission & Justice

Md. Rasooldeen; 3/11/08; (3 Items)

A housemaid has sought refuge in the Sri Lankan Embassy here, claiming she has not received her salary for 18 years. The maid, who has run away from her employer, came to the mission with only SR1,500 in her possession. She was brought there by a Sri Lankan driver who had recently come to work for the same employer. The driver told embassy officials that he helped the maid because he felt sorry for her. “She was not in sound mental health when she arrived at the mission,” an official from the embassy said, adding that she might have lost her memory because of an absence of contacts with her family for a long period. “She might have been driven into this mental state by what she suffered at her employer’s house,” he said, adding that the mission does not know whether the last house where she worked was that of her original sponsor.

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Ben Schneiders; 3/11/08

Women still earn far less than men — even when they do similar jobs — and deep-seated prejudice appears the most likely reason. Differences in productivity, education and experience play only a small role in the pay difference between the sexes. Professor Richardson says that overall, women earn only two-thirds as much as men do, but much of that difference is because men work many more hours, the paper presented to an Australian Fair Pay Commission forum on Friday says. However, when women and men are compared in full-time non-managerial jobs, women earn only 89% of their male counterparts.

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1/11/08

Pakistani police have raided an illegal child wedding in the city of Karachi, arresting the children’s parents and the Muslim cleric carrying out the ceremony. A court freed the parents on bail on Saturday, a day after police raided the wedding ceremony between a seven-year-old boy and a girl aged five. The parents said the wedding had been arranged to end an eight-year feud between the two families. Marriage below the age of 18 is illegal in Pakistan.

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Kevin Pamba; 31/10/08

Oppresive systems such as the culturally-induced male dominance and thinking pattern in PNG will exacerbate poverty which is already felt in some quarters of the country, an academic said. Dr Anastasia Sai, a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts at the Divine Word University (DWU) in Madang, said on Wednesday that it was time to change the customs and practices that disadvantaged the people if national ills like poverty were to be successfully addressed. Speaking on gender balance in nation-building at the symposium on media and governance organised by the DWU through its faculty and AusAID, Dr Sai said the status quo left half of the human resources (women) of PNG out of the development equation. She said this anomaly should be corrected if the country had to progress and national problems were to be effectively addressed.

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Habib Toumi; 31/10/08

An ominous dressing down from Islamists MPs concerned about “indecent outfits” has forced organisers of an international volleyball tournament to cancel a women’s exhibition match. Bahrain is currently hosting the penultimate stage of the Swatch-Federation Internationale de Volley Ball (FIVB) Beach Volley World Tour in which 24 teams are vying for the top honours. An exhibition match between two women’s teams was scheduled for Saturday, but mounting pressure from lawmakers, led by MP for the Islamic Menbar Mohammad Khalid and independent Salafi MP Jassem Al Saeedi, has led to its cancellation.

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Rana Husseini; 30/10/08

Criminal Prosecutor Tareq Shqeirat on Wednesday said he charged a 25-year-old man with premeditated murder in connection with the death of his sister who was stabbed over the weekend for reasons related to family honour. The 19-year-old victim, who was not identified by officials, was stabbed to death, allegedly by the suspect, on Saturday at their family home, one official source told The Jordan Times. The suspect then headed to the nearest police station and turned himself in and handed over the knife he allegedly used in the murder, the source added. “The suspect claimed that he killed his sister after seeing images of her engaging in sexual activities with a man on a mobile phone,” the source said.

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Yair Ettinger; 30/10/08

The young woman exudes strength and independence. But she bears the sign of a head fracture and scars on her face. One night, a few months ago, men broke into her apartment through the front door. They beat her up and humiliated her, knocking her head against the floor. They threatened to tear gas her if she tried to interfere with their rummaging through her possessions. And they left her bleeding on the floor. To whom could she go for help? Her family turned its back on her when she chose to divorce her ultra-Orthodox husband; her children were taken away from her; and the neighbors in her building cold shoulder her. Now it transpires that the authorities can’t help either. The investigation that began with a great deal of media fuss, has ended in failure. That, of course, took place far from the public eye. Elhanan Buzaglo is currently being tried in a Jerusalem court.

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P.K. Abdul Ghafour; 29/10/08

The Riyadh Women’s University, which is designed to become the world’s largest institution of higher learning exclusively for women, will have 13 colleges, including those for medicine, dentistry, nursing, naturopathy and pharmacology and a 700-bed hospital. The project will be completed by 2010. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah will lay the foundation stone today for the university’s new campus. “After we received instructions from higher authorities to establish a full-fledged university, we have consulted international engineering houses for the purpose of designing a world-class campus that can accommodate 40,000 students,” said Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf. “It will be the largest specialized campus for women in the world,” he added

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28/10/08

When Jordan signed the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, three major reservations were entered by Jordan concerning the right of women to pass on their nationality to their offspring, their right to housing and their right to travel. Now women activists are calling, and they are absolutely right, on these reservations, which go against the letter and spirit of the convention, to be repealed. When this international human rights treaty demands the end of all forms of discrimination against women, it defies logic to maintain three major prejudiced rules that affect some of their most important rights. It mystifies most modern rationalisation why traditional forms of discrimination against women persist.

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Azhar Masood; 28/10/08

Pakistan police yesterday said that they will probe allegations that a young newlywed was mauled by dogs and shot to death in front of her father in the latest so-called “honor killing” to prompt outrage in Pakistan. According to police and rights activists, 17-year-old Tasleem Solangi was killed back in March in a rural area of Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh. The girl was falsely accused of immorality and had dogs set on her as a punishment before she was shot dead, the girl’s parents said yesterday. Gul Sher, father of the girl, demanded justice for the killing of his daughter after he said a council in their village in the southern province of Sindh falsely accused her of having sex with a man. “They made dogs run after her and bite her then she was shot dead,” Sher told reporters in Karachi.

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