     CeebBaaDhacday | Monday, February 26, 2001 - 07:43 am
U.S. Appeals Court Blocks Deportation of Woman Fleeing FGM
The 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals "blocked the deportation of an African woman who sought asylum out of fear her tribe would mutilate her genitals or kill her for losing her virginity."
Adelaide Abankwah was denied asylum by the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) in 1997 after she fled her tribe in Ghana. She claims that she could not return on the basis that she would either be killed or genitally mutilated after losing her virginity. On Monday, the Appeals Court heard her case and decided that "in light of the present conditions in Ghana," she should not be deported.
Although Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) has been illegal in Ghana since 1994, very few people have been prosecuted and many women continue to undergo the traditional custom.
Currently, Abankwah’s lawyer is requesting that she be released from detainment at the INS.
[Source: Nando Times and AP - July 14, 1999
Express your opinion please. |
| CeebBaaDhacday | Monday, February 26, 2001 - 08:03 am
Woman to Serve 8 Years for Mutilation
A French court has sentenced Hawa Greou of Malia, Africa to eight years for mutilating the genitals of about 50 girls.
The case constituted the first trial to be prompted by a victim's complaint as well as France's largest ever genital mutilation case since so-called "female circumcision" was outlawed in 1984. Twenty-six parents of the girls sent to Greou for mutilation were also tried as accomplices and punished with sentences ranging from 2 years in prison to suspended terms.
At least 130 million girls within Africa, the Middle East and Asia have been forced to suffer female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM involves the removal of all or part of a girl's genitalia from her body, often using crude instruments and without anesthesia. FGM, designed to preserve women's chastity, destroys women's potential for sexual pleasure and can cause shock, hemorrhaging, infection, urinary incontinence, painful sexual intercourse, infertility, and childbirth complications.
[Source: The Age of Melbourne, Australia - February 18, 1999]
Senegal Bans Female Circumcision
The government of Senegal officially ended the practice of female genital mutilation on Wednesday, thanks to years of struggle by women's rights activists, educators, doctors, and politicians. Violators of the new ban will face a maximum prison term of 5 years.
Last February, Senegal President Abdou Diouf called for an end to female genital mutilation, and asked government officials to formulate a law banning the practice. One month later, fourteen individual Senegal villages banned the practice after many local women took a course which described the health risks caused by female genital mutilation.
UNICEF director Carol Bellamy commented that the ban "reflects the resolve of African women to end a cruel and unacceptable practice which violates the right of all girls to free, safe and healthy lives."
Female genital mutilation is an often crude operation in which the genitalia of pre-pubescent girls is cut off. Health professionals testify that it limits normal bodily functions, robs girls of sexual pleasure, causes horrible scarring, and can lead to infections and long-term health complications, especially when unsterile health instruments are used.
Supporters of the practice argue that it is necessary to guarantee women's sexual chastity and faithfulness to their husbands. There is no doubt that the practice achieves this goal, since the operation makes sex uncomfortable at best, and extremely painful at worst.
The countries of Burkino Faso, Central African Republic, Djibouti, Ghana, Guinea and Togo also outlaw female genital mutilation, or its euphemism, "female circumcision."
[Source: CNN - January 15, 1999]
Female Genital Mutilation Declines in Egypt
New research from the Population Council has found that young girls in Egypt today are at least ten percent less likely to endure female circumcision than were their mothers. The decline seems to have begun after the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) took place in Cairo in 1994, intensifying the Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) campaign.
In Egypt, circumcision typically takes place before or just as a girl reaches puberty. The procedure usually involves the removal of all or part of the clitoris and parts of the labia minora. The practice persists due to religious and cultural beliefs that FGM is necessary to moderate female sexuality and make girls more feminine and marriageable.
The survey of more than 9,000 children and their parents, conducted in 1997, found that young girls were less likely to be mutilated than were older, adolescent girls. FGM remained high among girls between the ages of ten and nineteen years old (about 84 percent). When three groups of girls were compared in the survey, a link between the decline in FGM and the ICPD conference can be seen. Among the youngest group of girls, born between 1985 to 1987, a significant decrease can be measured.
[Source: Population Council - February 1999]
Woman Seeks Asylum to Escape Genital Mutilation
Virginia Anikwata is fighting to remain in the United States. Forced to undergo female genital mutilation in her home country of Nigeria, Anikwata is seeking asylum to protect her eleven year-old daughter from the same fate.
"It [female genital mutilation] produces lifelong pain and suffering and also produces death for many girls subjected to it," said Anikwata, who presented her bid for asylum to an Immigration and Naturalization Services officer yesterday.
Anikwata's fight to stay in the United States has been ongoing since her husband's death ten years ago. Upon return to Nigeria, she and her daughter would become the property of her late husband's extended family. Anikwata fears that her daughter would then be mutilated.
[Source: Washington Post - December 7, 1998] |
| ceebbaadhacday | Monday, February 26, 2001 - 08:05 am
On Friday afternoon (7-12), a Planned Parenthood clinic in Spokane, Washington was bombed. No one was hurt because the clinic is closed on Fridays, and no one was in the building. Officials and clinic workers are skeptical about conclusions that the bombing was merely a decoy for a bank robbery that followed at a nearby U.S. Bank branch. Sandra Meicher, executive director of Planned Parenthood for Spokane and Whitman County, said she believes the clinic may have been targeted by antiabortion militants, although the Pines Street clinic that was bombed does not provide abortion services and has not received threats. However, Spokane has a history of antiabortion protests including a late June Operation Rescue protest at the clinic’s main office. Local papers speculated that the bombing resembles the actions of militant right-wing groups which may be working with the anti-abortion movement. Authorities suspect that members of a racist group called Phineas Priesthood may be responsible for the Friday bombing and a similar bombing that occurred on April 1.
[Source: The Spokesman-Review - July 13, 1996] |
| balkawaran | Monday, February 26, 2001 - 08:12 am
Woman on trial in Paris for circumcisions
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE, copyright 2/5/99
PARIS - In the largest case of its kind in France, a Malian woman went on trial in Paris this week accused of circumcising 48 young girls, many of whose parents stood in the dock as her accomplices and face up to two years in prison.
Pitting French law, which has banned female gential mutilation since 1984, against an African custom many parents consider essential if their daughter is to find a husband in her home country, the trial is the first of this type to be presided over by a female judge and the first to be triggered by a victim’s complaint.
Mariatou Koita, now a 23-year old Paris law student, went to police in January 1994 after Hawa Greou came to her paren ts’ apartment to circumcise her younger sister, Miriam.
Koita, who subsequenty left home, recognized the visitor as the woman who had circumcised her 10 years before, when she was eight.
Charged with willful violence and the mutilation of minors, Greou, 52, faces a maximum jail term of 20 years. Twenty eight parents are charged with complicity.
Police found the other defendants by tapping Greous phone and going through her address book. |
| Mental-slavery | Tuesday, February 27, 2001 - 02:09 am
Brothers and sisters,
If you want to see the western world to present and treat Africans in a fairer constitutional way, let your soul rest in peace, as it is nearly two centuries ago since, the human-being of Haiti demanded a universal Liberty, Equality and Fratenirty but never acheived because of color of their skins.
Why is Africa in hell and the whites are prospering?
Be smart sunny. |
