Marianne Møllmann is senior policy advisor with Amnesty International's head-quarters in London. Prior to working with Amnesty International, Ms. Mollmann worked on women's rights for over eight years with Human Rights Watch in New York City. Ms. Mollmann specializes in reproductive rights, women in conflict, economic rights, and anti-discrimination. As co-coordinator of the Women's Working Group of the International Network for Economic Social and Cultural Rights, Marianne was one of the organizers behind the Montreal Principles on equal access to ESC rights for women. She holds an LLM in International Human Rights Law from Essex University.
This week, Senators Leahy and Crapo introduced a bill to reauthorize and amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The bad news is that the proposed bill substantively slashes funding by almost 20 percent.
Coercive sterilizations and castration are at the extreme end of a spectrum that also includes criminal sanctions for drug use during pregnancy and barring LBGT individuals from in-vitro fertilization services and adoption, as well as a host of other policies geared at making pregnancy and parenting difficult for those deemed unworthy.
Sexual harassment in middle and high schools today is motivated by either misogyny or homophobia. Neither has to do with sex. And neither would be helped by treating sexual harassment between children as a result of overactive hormones to be dismissed.
Perhaps the most interesting question in the juxtaposition of women’s rights (or gay rights, or ethnic minority rights) and democracy is not whether some people’s rights are sacrificed for popular rule (they are), but rather whether they should be as a matter of principle.
I am tired of it: violence against women may be a current fact—every 3 minutes a woman is beaten up — but it is not inevitable. So here are my top three key recommendations for how you (yes: you) can make it stop before it even starts.
Restrictions on abortions just don’t work. This is the predictable, yet bold, conclusion of a report to be presented at the United Nations on Monday by a UN-appointed independent expert on health.
The use of Steve Jobs’ premature death as an anti-choice argument is flawed on at least two levels, but that hasn’t stopped anti-choicers from exploiting his life for their political purposes.
Women living in the United States can’t appeal to international human rights law when they are inadequately protected by US law — because the US has not signed on to CEDAW.
For many of us women, the presidential candidates’ positions on abortion and reproductive health aren’t abstractions — they are central to our lives.
On June 19, 2008, in the wake of decades of reports of vicious sexual violence in conflicts across the globe, the United Nations Security Council declared that it is time to act.
