Women's rights

​​​​​Justin Hansford often remembers the first time he travelled to Geneva. He was there to present his organization’s shadow report for the review by the UN Committee against Torture of his country, the United States. Hansford, a lawyer for the Black Lives Matter movement, came to support the mother of Mike Brown, an African American teenager who was shot multiple times by police officer Darren Wilson on the afternoon of 9 August 2014, while he was walking down a street of St Louis, Ferguson, Missouri. Mike Brown’s slain body lay on the asphalt for four hours before it was removed. “Out of all the official mechanisms - the civil courts, criminal courts, the US Government, the Department of Justice that decided not to press charges against Wilson – [the UN Committee] was the only place where Mike Brown’s mother got a chance to tell her story,” Hansford said. “The activists got to tell their story in front of an official mechanism that listened to their voices and gave them respec...

Why were you released? Noura Aljizawi admitted she’s asked that question a lot. The activist and former vice president of the Syrian National Coalition was held for seven months by Syrian police in 2012, where she was beaten and shocked with electrical rods. Many others had disappeared in similar circumstances, never to be seen or heard from again. Yet she got out. “Being released and not killed was not down to the humanity of the torturers…but thanks to you,” she told an audience at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva recently. “Human rights organizations, bloggers, activities, organizations…your support in undertaking a large solidarity campaign and therefore putting the regime under pressure not to kill me but to ultimately release me.” Aljizawi spoke during a High Level Panel discussion on human rights in the Syrian Arab Republic. The panel’s purpose was to increase the visibility of violations and abuses of human rights law and humanitarian law committed by all sides in ...