By Matthew Pritchard
Washington, DC

Amnesty International cites 2004 State Department Human Rights Report

The "fundamental inability and unwillingness" of certain African political and justice systems to treat women fairly continues to undercut efforts to address human rights issues on the continent, said an Amnesty International campaign director during congressional testimony on the newly released State Department Human Rights Report.

Adotei Akwei, who directs Amnesty International's campaign to stop violence against women, joined representatives of Human Rights Watch and Global Grassroots March 17 to comment on the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices -- 2004 to the Africa, Global Human Rights and International Organizations Subcommittee of the House of Representatives. The 5,000-page report, which is congressionally mandated, "provides a critical diagnostic tool" in the documentation of human rights in 19 countries, he said.

Akwei cited several instances of human-rights violations that need address and redress by both the individual countries and the international community. He called on the members of the House of Representatives subcommittee to work to provide the "political will and resources to make a difference" in Africa and elsewhere in the world.

Among the many aspects of human rights reported in Africa, Akwei pointed to "the statistics measuring discrimination and gender-based violence inflicted upon women, either in conflict and post conflict situations or within their families or communities," as "staggering."

In certain African countries such as Rwanda, Burundi and Liberia, among others, "girls as young as 8 and women as old as 80 have been raped and mutilated in the open, in front of their families and communities," he said.

In Uganda, despite having "broad representation of women in its parliament" and laws that protect against rape and battery, there are no laws to protect women from being abused by their spouses, he said. "Many law enforcement officials continued to view wife beating as a husband's prerogative and rarely intervened in cases of domestic violence," he added.

Human trafficking laws are also ambiguous there, Akwei said, for although the "law does not specifically prohibit trafficking in persons," there are laws that prohibit offenses related to human trafficking, such as trading in slaves or detaining women for sex.

The most serious problems in Uganda, however, stem from the 18-year conflict between the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan Peoples' Defense Forces (UPDF), Akwei said.

"The women have been particularly hurt by this conflict," he said. "Thousands of women and girls were victims of abduction and rape by rebel forces, but there were also reports that women and girls were raped by the UPDF."

AIDS and female genital mutilation are two issues that are caught up in the human-rights question. Throughout Africa, Akwei explained, "violence against women is both a cause and a consequence of a woman's infection with HIV," which contributes seriously to the spread of the disease on a continent already overburdened by its social effects.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is also a major problem African women face every day, Akwei said. In Ethiopia, "90 percent of women undergo one of four forms of female genital mutilation -- circumcision, clitoridectomy, excision and infibulation," he said, citing a 2003 Ethiopia National Baseline Survey.

Even though Ethiopia's constitution prohibits bodily injury, there is no law that specifically outlaws FGM, the campaign director said. The same is true in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where "the law does not prohibit the practice of FGM and the government initiative to help end the practice was underfunded and understaffed," he said.

Wife beating and marital rape continue to be problems facing Ethiopia, Akwei said. There are no laws against domestic violence or sexual harassment, he added.

Akwei also cited Nigeria as another country where human rights abuses against women -- domestic violence, discrimination, child abuse, FGM and child prostitution -- are widespread. In addition, cruel punishments such as amputation and stoning are still in practice, even though there were no reports that these punishments were carried out in 2004, the NGO official added.

In the Darfur region of Sudan, which is outside the control of any government, abuses against women have become worse, Akwei said. Girls are "targets of violence" and they "continue to be deliberately and systematically targeted by opposing forces for extrajudicial execution, rape, assault, harassment and mutilation," he said.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International InformationPrograms, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)