South Sudan women focus of new push for rights by female lobbyists

Eclipsed by a stretch of human rights abuses, women from the new state of South Sudan can hope to join the global web of freedom if a new push by female lobbyists to have their interests incorporated into the African Charter on women’s rights come to bear.

A coalition of 37 women organizations from nine African countries, known as Raising A Voice, have the rights of Southern Sudan women on their list of activities under a new project rallying for the ratification and domestication of the African Union (AU) Protocol on Women’s Rights.

As part of an African campaign on women’s rights informed by the Maputo platform, which was adopted in 2003 by the AU Heads of States, the lobbyists have stated their keenness to have South Sudan become a signatory of the Protocol, although a few hurdles stand in the way.

“South Sudan first needs to become a member of the AU so that the protocol becomes something meaningful,” says Faiza Mohamed, the director of Equality Now, Kenya. “We will advocate for the government to ratify it and then we will link up with Sudanese women in that country and see ways in which we can support them and invite them into our coalition.”

Mohamed, whose Nairobi based organization also acts as a secretariat for the collation, said the movement hopes to gain wider political space for women, obtain higher girls’ school enrolment, eliminate of early marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM), and establish a woman’s right to make decisions on reproductive health.

“We want to see real change in the lives of women, not just in numbers but in active participation and playing a good role in terms of public decisions,” says Mohamed. “We want to save many women, accessing justice as well as protection of their rights.”

In May, an Amnesty International Report on Sudan indicated that women continue to suffer cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment from armed groups, both from government and militia groups.

In one section captured by the report, concerns were raised that “police continue to arrest women, young girls and men in the North on grounds of ‘indecent or ‘immoral’ dressing or behavior, a trend that the North is not keen on relaxing on, according to the set laws and structures.”

Another section of the report reads: “The public order police continued to blackmail women and sexually harass them during arrest and in detention, and to target women from vulnerable backgrounds, including women living in poverty, IDPs and women from Eritrean and Ethiopian communities living in Khartoum.”

Regional leaders are also nervous in regards to the country’s long tradition of inter communal fighting over cattle, land and natural resources, and proliferation of small arms and human rights abuses, although the scale of incidence is expected to lower with the ushering in of the newest republic.

But it is the 2009 National Security Act, passed in December 2010 and effective as of February (2011), that Raising A Voice fear most due to its gloomy human rights record of arresting and detaining political activists and human rights.

According to the group, whose is sponsored by Oxfam GB, trends in the Horn and East African region have shown that national security agents have continued to be immune from prosecution and disciplinary measures for human rights violations.

But hope is on the way as Raising a Voice members, drawn from Equality Now, Africa Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), East Africa Sub Regional Support Initiative and Akina Mama wa Afrika, lobby the 22 remaining countries to ratify the protocol.

“We have 53 member states in the AU and now that South Sudan has become an independent country, they will properly join and become the fifty fourth state,” says Mohamed. “At the moment, 21 countries have ratified but we need 22 countries to ratify the Protocol so that it becomes binding.”

Issues captured by the Protocol include elimination of discrimination against women; rights to life, integrity and security of the person; elimination of harmful practices; access to justice and equal protection before the law; protection of women in armed conflicts and right to inheritance.