July 2010

Increasingly Urgent Action

As this newsletter goes out, we hear news of the detention of feminist activists in Honduras during events to mark the anniversary of the coup there last year. A few weeks ago, allies from the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe called to alert us that their team members had been arrested and their offices in Harare raided. Lately, the closing of democratic space for frontline activists seems palpable. While we worry for the safety of our friends, this trend also demands more energy and resources. We draw attention to these violations even as we move forward with many allies to find new ways to hold governments accountable. And sometimes these collective efforts bear fruit. In the midst of troubling news, we celebrate the release of political prisoners from the Atenco land rights struggle. JASS' quiet collaboration with the Nobel Women’s Initiative and many Mexican allies including Consorcio and CIMAC helped create the political pressure and support necessary to enable Supreme Court justices to do the right thing despite a risky political context. On June 30, the Court determined that “false or insufficient” evidence had been used to convict the twelve political prisoners, and demanded their immediate release. One judge, Juan Silva Meza, said the case appeared to have been "a disguised form of criminalising social protest" in Mexico. This victory inspires and motivates all of us to continue the fight for justice.

~ Lisa VeneKlasen, ED + the JASS team

Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) face violence and threats as they pursue justice from land rights to LGBTI agendas. A conference in Oaxaca in April drew over 50 WHRDs from every country in Mesoamerica to strategize about preventing, reporting, and responding to the dangers common to them all. Regional WHRDs (Consorcio Oaxaca, UDEFEGUA and Alianza Centroamericana) organized the conference in partnership with international organizations, JASS and AWID. Activists set the agenda, controlled the process, and owned it. JASS’ Marusia Lopez Cruz is leading follow-up action at the national, regional, and international levels, including meetings with the UN Human Rights Commision and the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women.

Young Timorese Feminists Engage with Nation Building

“The most surprising thing about the first leadership training in Timor Leste was the young women activists’ determination to work with their government,” says Nani Zulminarni, JASS Southeast Asia’s co-director. Many items on the Timorese feminists’ strategic agenda echo those from JASS training processes in Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia: rights to property, education and health, and resources for improved livelihoods. But no other young activists include such a high level of government engagement on their wish lists. According to Nani, “the Timorese group is taking up this rare strategic opportunity to influence nation-building in their newly independent country – the activists know that their government is supposed to listen to them now.” Timorese people were divided by a referendum on independence, and that split – between those who wanted to remain part of Indonesia and those who did not – continues to create tension within nascent women’s movements. Here, JASS training provides a safe space within which women can surface and address painful conflicts in order to build a more inclusive feminist agenda and stronger alliances for change.

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Backlash Strikes LBTI Organizers Worldwide

Who’s New

JASS Program Assistant Maggie Hazvinei Mapondera hails from Zimbabwe and graduated in 2009 from Yale University with a BA in Comparative Literature focusing on African literatures in French and English. Along with her writing and editing skills, Maggie brings hands-on activist experience. As an intern at the Refugee Law Project in Uganda, she facilitated an urban narratives project with women refugees in Kampala, while in post-Katrina New Orleans, she volunteered in teams rebuilding low-income housing. Maggie organized with Zimbabwean refugees and asylum-seekers in South Africa as an intern for PASSOP (People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression and Poverty), and spent a summer doing Theater for Social Change in Swaziland.

Sally-Jean Shackleton is a Cape Town-based feminist activist. Sally-Jean is involved in the Sex Workers Education Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) and in the transgender movement in South Africa – she helped to establish the first African organization dedicated to transgendered people’s rights. As a JASS Knowledge and Communications Associate, she documents and shares JASS experience and learning in Southern Africa and beyond. A long-time facilitator, writer, and trainer in South African women’s organizations, most recently as Director of Women’sNet, Sally-Jean focuses on using information, communications and networking to empower girls and women, giving them the tools they need to tell their own stories in ways that fully reflect their reality.

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