By Debra Wirth
"No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." — Article 5.
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile." — Article 9.
In theory, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides a comprehensive list of rights for all the world's people. In practice, they are violated every day. More and more of the sufferers of human rights abuses are women.
These violations against women are the subject of a report released on International Women's Day as part of a worldwide campaign to stop them. Amnesty International's Women in the front line documents violations, past and present, from more than 40 countries.
Julie Urquhart, from Amnesty's national office in Sydney, told Green Left that women suffer human rights abuses because "they work as lawyers, as doctors, as journalists. Women are targeted more as they become more prominent and active in society. Because they work for their own rights and for the rights of their families."
Rape is used as a form of torture in attempts to extract information or "confessions" of opposition activity. Both a physical injury and an assault on a woman's mental and emotional well-being, rape is a particularly insidious human rights violation. Amnesty receives numerous reports of interrogators who have used, and continue to use, rape in this way.
The report also describes women suffering simply because they hold religious beliefs different from those approved by governments.
"Saudi Arabian authorities arrested Zahra' Habib Mansur al-Nasser, a housewife, in July 1989. As she and her husband returned from performing religious rites in Damascus, border guards had searched them and found in Zahra al-Nasser's possession a Shi'a prayer book and a photograph of Ayatollah Khomeini. The majority of suspected government opponents arrested in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia during 1989 were Shi'a Muslims. Three days later her dead body, reportedly bearing marks of torture, was returned to her family."
Although most human rights abuses against women detailed in the report occurred in Third World countries, it also describes incidents in the developed countries. However, the cases mentioned tend to be well known and are not documented in as much detail.
Urquhart called attention to conditions in Armagh Prison in Northern Ireland, the case of Mairhead Farrell and conditions at Lexington Federal Prison in the United States.
Several women held in Armagh Prison reported that strip-searches were not carried out solely for security purposes. Amnesty is concerned that they are performed with the deliberate intention of degrading or humiliating the women.
The report also questions "the procedures used by the United Kingdom government and the legislation governing the use of lethal force by the security forces" in Northern Ireland. It refers to Mairhead Farrell and two other members of the Irish Republican Army who were shot dead by Special Air Services in Gibraltar in March 1988. The three were unarmed when they were killed. Amnesty concludes that "government inquest procedures left unanswered the question of whether their deaths resulted from an official policy of deliberate planned killings".
The United States has the largest death row population in the world: 2300 people in late 1990. In October, 30 women were on death row. Once sentenced to death, people are often kept there for years without knowing when their sentence is to be carried out.
Cases of "disappearances", make up a significant proportion of the violations listed in the report. Amnesty thinks that repressive governments are employing this tactic more frequently because they can deny any involvement due to lack of evidence. When married men are "disappeared", women are widowed, yet are unable to claim state or other benefits because their husbands are not recognised as legally dead.
Hundreds of Salvadorans have disappeared, many of them during the ARENA government of President Alfredo Cristiani. One of the victims was Sara Cristina Chan-Chan Medina, a photojournalist working for a major trade union federation, in August 1989. Amnesty said:
"Uniformed members of the Salvadoran Air Force arrested her in the street. An Air Force official told the young woman's mother several days later that her daughter had been arrested by the Air Force and then transferred to Treasury Police custody. The Air Force and Treasury Police, however, continue to deny that they ever held her in custody. Sara Cristina Chan-Chan Medina and Juan Francisco Massi Chavez, who was arrested with her, are still missing."
Israeli law allows authorities to arrest and imprison people without charge or trial. The law is used mainly to imprison Palestinians from the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Na'ila 'A'esh was arrested in February 1987. Reporters to Women in the front line said Israeli authorities hooded her, knocked her head against a wall and forced her to stand in bitterly cold conditions for prolonged periods. She was in the early stages of pregnancy, and when the authorities denied her access to medical attention for bleeding, she miscarried. Palestinian women held at Ha Sharon Prison in Israel went on hunger strike in April 1990 to demand improved prison conditions, especially for pregnant women.
Women in the front line is a very well-researched report on human rights violations against women. However, it doesn't attempt to analyse why women in so many countries are victims of such appalling violations of their human rights.
Perhaps the report speaks for itself. The overwhelming majority of these violations occur under Third World dictatorships — many of them supported and even given military aid by countries such as the United States and Britain. These regimes serve the interests of those governments and their multinational corporations. Women in the story of women who resisted, and women who continue to resist, this exploitation and the conditions it generates.