Women's rights

GENEVA (23 June 2017) – UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein on Friday said the creation of an international investigation into allegations of gross violations and abuses in the Kasai regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo sends a strong message to the perpetrators that the international community is serious about bringing them to justice. The resolution, passed by consensus in the UN Human Rights Council, calls on the High Commissioner to appoint a team of international experts to investigate “alleged human rights violations and abuses, and violations of international humanitarian law in the Kasai regions”. Since 2016, some 1.3 million people from the Kasais have been internally displaced by the violence, while some 30,000 refugees have fled to Angola. “We fully support the establishment of an international investigation by the Human Rights Council as a step forward in identifying the perpetrators of gross violations and bringing them to justice,” Hig...

​​​​​The basic values of the international human rights system are under attack in a new diverse ways in 2017, and one important part of the explanation is the rapidly growing sense of economic insecurity afflicting large segments of societies, said Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. “People feel exposed, vulnerable, overwhelmed and helpless and some are being systematically marginalized both economically and socially,” he said. “But the human rights community has barely engaged with this resulting phenomenon of deep economic insecurity.” Alston made his statement during the presentation of his report to the Human Rights Council, taking place in Geneva throughout June. The focus of the report is “universal basic income” as a means to protect and promote human rights. “In many respects, basic income offers a bold and imaginative solution to pressing problems that are about to become far more intractable as a result of the directions in whic...

​​​​​In 2013, Afra* was abducted from her home in Northeastern Nigeria by the Boko Haram insurgent group that forced her to marry one of its members. She was 13 years old. When he died a few months later, Afra was made to marry another fighter. It was only in September 2016 that she was rescued from captivity by the Nigerian military and brought to a camp for internally displaced persons. There Afra realized that she was pregnant. Seeking the support of her family, she has since been staying with two of her sisters. But support has been slow to come: she carries the stigma of being pregnant with the child of a member of Boko Haram. Afra’s story is typical of that of hundreds of young girls and women who have been caught up in Boko Haram’s terror campaign in the Lake Chad Basin. The future for Afra, the 82 “Chibok Girls” released in early May this year and those sharing similarly painful stories, remains uncertain. A long journey to recovery For the UN Special Rapporteurs on s...