Tortur og vold mot kvinner

Kvinnefronten er med i nettverket Resist Pornculture – sammen sender vi oppfordringer til United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mèndez, i forkant av Human Rights Council i mars 2016. Det er på tide at tortur begått mot kvinner anerkjennes.

Dear Mr. Méndez,

We are aware you will present your report on women and girls and the perspective on torture to the Human Rights Council in March, 2016. Weare writing to you, Mr. Mendez, to ensure our knowledge and experience informs your report to the Human Rights Council.  Women and girls must have their human right of equality not to be subjected to torture by non-State actors upheld as articles 2 and 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states.

We are submitting that women and girls do suffer violent victimization that amounts to torture perpetrated by private individuals or groups (such as spouses, pimps, punters, traffickers … group/gang rapists, for example) that has been inflicted in the private or domestic sphere.

On January 15, 2008, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak wrote that forms of violence against women such as intimate partner violence, human trafficking, and FGM, are comparable to “classic” torture that State officials inflict (A/HRC/7/3).  On the 15th of January, 2008, the UN Committee against Torture affirmed that under the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) that: (a) torture is absolutely prohibited, (b) torture is distinct from other crimes, and (c) a State bears due diligence duties to prevent, investigate, prosecute and punish acts of non-State torture consistent with the CAT (CAT/C/GC/2).  Women and girls and the non-State torture atrocities committed against them have consistently been invisibilized, women and girls have been unheard when truth-telling about the non-State torture they have suffered.  This human rights discrimination and silencing must end now!  We are asking you, Mr. Méndez, to ensure that your report makes this happen.

Respectfully submitted,

Kvinnefronten, The Womens Front /Norway.