Jerome Delay / AP
One in every 113 people on the planet, according to the United Nations, is currently either a refugee, asylum seeker, or internally displaced within their own country.
Human rights defenders play a critical role in promoting corporate respect for human rights. Through their work, defenders help to identify, prevent, mitigate, and ensure accountability for corporate human rights abuses. Whether coming from, living in, representing, or supporting affected communities, defenders are both directly affected by, and key stakeholders regarding, the human rights impacts of business. Despite this, the incidence of attacks, threats, and harassment against defenders working on business and human rights issues is on the rise. Defenders around the world face significant risks to their lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, as they work under the threat of extrajudicial killings, abductions, surveillance, criminalisation, and intimidation as a result of their efforts to defend human rights in the face of business interests. These risks have been recognised by various United Nations (UN) and regional human rights bodies.
A woman waits to have her prenatal exam
By Helen Branswell – June 22, 2016
Abortions — legal or otherwise — may be increasing in Latin American countries where the Zika virus is spreading, new research suggests.
The data, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, provide an early glimpse of a hard-to-track phenomenon that may be altering the way this unprecedented Zika outbreak is recorded in the annals of medical history.
Requests for abortion-inducing drugs shot up in some Zika-affected countries after the alarm was raised about Zika infection in pregnancy, according to researchers who analyzed traffic to the website of an international nonprofit organization that provides the drugs early in pregnancy. The requests rose by between 36 and 108 percent. Abortion restrictions are widespread across Central and South America.
June 23 is International Widows Day
Source: A Widow & Her Child in Kenya, photo by Kristin Meekhof
By Kristin Meekhof & Heather Ibrahim-Leathers – June 21, 2016
Widow. What does this word mean to you? When you hear the word widow, what image comes to mind? Perhaps, you are thinking about a famous widow or even someone near and dear to you. However, for millions of women across the globe, becoming a widow marks the beginning of a life of unspeakable suffering and tragedy. For these women and their children, widowhood is not simply a change in marital status, but the end to economic, social, political, physical, and emotional security.
The event of widowhood for many widows means an immediate loss of all household income. As a result, the widow is evicted from her marital home and rendered homeless. She is ostracized and blamed for her husbands’ death, even if the circumstances of his death were well known. Cultural norms impose extreme restrictions on the widow’s mobility, dress, and diet. She loses her rightful place and voice within her society. Importantly, the widow is unable to inherit her rightful estate, especially as it is pertains to land, which in and of itself is a critical human rights violation. Obscenely, in parts of the world, the widow actually is considered property of her husband’s estate and she ‘inherited’ as chattel through forced marriage to her husband’s next of kin.
This page provides an overview of the Impact on Marriage: Program Assessment of Conditional Cash Transfers (IMPACCT) study conducted by the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), with the support of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The study provides a robust evaluation of the impact of the Apni Beti Apna Dhan (Our Daughters Our Wealth) CCT program on girls’ lives. ICRW evaluated the program to determine if an economic incentive provided by the government of the Indian State of Haryana could improve the value of girls. The study assessed whether the girls in the program were more likely than non-participating girls to remain unmarried until age 18, whether they were more likely to stay in school , and whether the girls’ and parents’ aspirations for their daughters had increased.
IMPORTANT – FIRST CLICK ON LINK: http://www.icrw.org/hub/impacct-findings-evaluation-india-based-conditional-cash-transfer-program
