The US and recent undermining tactics at the Human Rights Council

The Human Rights Council (HRC) is the UN’s main “political” human rights body, meaning it’s the main place where governments discuss and negotiate human rights issues, challenge one another about their national contexts and hold one another accountable for violations. The HRC meets a few times a year, and as we reflect on its recently-concluded September session, it is important to revisit some of the details of the June convening to better understand how some states seek to avoid scrutiny and undermine the entire s

Amid the spread of industrial farming, transgenic crops and seed patents, rural women are conserving native varieties and teaching others about agro-ecology.

In August 2015, Luisa Lozano, a Kichwa woman from the Saraguro people joined an indigenous mobilisation to defend their right to land from corporation takeovers and demand increased protection of indigenous rights. It is during these protests, that military and police “beat a pregnant women with truncheons, dragging her about 30 meters and spraying her with pepper gas.” Soon thereafter, Luisa Lozano was arrested for defending the pregnant woman and was sentenced to 4 years in prison alongside other women.

Mayan weavers are organising to defend their art, pushing for new legislation to recognise and protect their ‘collective intellectual property’

After the June 14th vote that approved the bill legalizing the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancies, various groups and institutions ramped up their opposition. Out of arguments, they began resorting to violence.

If you’ve spent any time in a feminist space in the last decade or so, you’ve heard the question, “Where is the money for women’s rights?”

A young feminist activist from Brazil describes the cycle of collective pain, mourning, and hope that she and her comrades experienced throughout recent political events

This June-July session of the Human Rights Council (HRC38), as every year, focuses on issues of gender and sexuality.

On June 5, 2018, AWID’s co-Executive Director Hakima Abbas interacted with three other panelists at the opening ceremony of the European Development Days 2018, in a discussion focused on global movements tackling multiple forms of violence against women and girls.

Without accountability, corporations will continue to exploit the system and us all