Special Features

HRW Reports on Efforts to End Dress Code Arrests

12 March 2009

HRW Reports on Efforts to End Dress Code Arrests

Human Rights Watch posted the following story about a Guyana law requiring people to wear gender appropriate clothes on March 5, 2009.

(Georgetown) – Guyana should halt arrests and police abuse of transgender people and repeal a repressive law that criminalizes wearing clothes considered appropriate only for the opposite sex, six human rights organizations said today in a letter to President Bharrat Jagdeo.The letter was signed by the Caribbean Forum for Liberation of Genders and Sexualities (CARIFLAGS), Global Rights, Guyana Rainbow Foundation (Guybow), Human Rights Watch, International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), and the Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD). They called on the Guyanese authorities to drop the charges against seven people arrested under the law in February, 2009, and investigate allegations of abuse by the police.

“Police are using archaic laws to violate basic freedoms,” said Scott Long director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. “This is a campaign meant to drive people off the streets simply because they dress or act in ways that transgress gender norms.”

Between February 6 and 10, police in the Guyanese capital, Georgetown, detained at least eight people, some of them twice, charging seven of them under section 153 (1) (xlvii) of the Summary Jurisdiction (Offences) Act Chapter 8:02. This criminalizes as a minor offense the “wearing of female attire by man; wearing of male attire by women.”

Officers took the detainees to Brickdam police station. The detainees reported to SASOD Guyana, a local human rights organization working for the freedoms of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, that police refused to allow them to make a phone call or contact a lawyer, both basic rights under Guyanese law.

Police kept five of the men in solitary confinement until the day of the trial, contending that it was for their safety.

The first arrests took place on February 6, when plainclothes policemen detained three men in downtown Georgetown, near Stabroek Market. On February 7, the police detained five more. In both occasions acting Chief Magistrate Melissa Robertson fined the detainees GY$7,500 (US$36) each. On February 10, the police detained four people; three of whom had been among those arrested on February 6 and 7.

In court, when handing down the sentence, Chief Magistrate Robertson told the detainees they were not women but men and exhorted them to “go to church and give their lives to Christ.”

“The enforcement of laws repressing individuals’ self-expression is against basic provisions of human rights,” said Stefano Fabeni, program director of the LGBTI Initiative at Global Rights. “Police treatment during arrest and detention of the eight men shows serious breaches of Guyana’s international human rights obligations.”

The Summary Jurisdiction (Offenses) Act provides for adjudication of these cases without a jury. The act dates from colonial times. Other offenses under the same provision include: “exposing for sale cattle in improper part of town (iv); beating [a] mat in [a] public way in town (vii); cleansing cask, etc. in public way (xl); driving cattle without proper assistance (xv), etc.”

Police use the law to target people born male who wear what police regard as female clothing. This violates the individual’s privacy, freedom of expression, and personal dignity.

“It is outrageous in this day and age that human beings get arrested for cross-gender expression,” said Vicky Sawyer, transgender representative for CARIFLAGS. “Transgender issues should be dealt with using international human rights standards, not police abuse.”

As a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Guyana has agreed to respect the absolute prohibition against torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment set out in the treaty (Article 7). Article 14 of the same treaty affirms the right to counsel. The treaty also bars interference with the right to privacy (Article 17) and protects freedom of expression (Article 19). Guyana has the obligation to respect and ensure these rights, and to do so in a nondiscriminatory manner, as set forth in Article 2.

Guyana has several laws that criminalize relationships between people of the same sex. Section 351 of the Criminal Law (Offenses) Act punishes committing acts of “gross indecency” with a male person with a two-year prison sentence. Section 352 criminalizes any “attempt to commit unnatural offenses.” This includes a 10-year prison sentence for any “male [that] indecently assaults any other male person.” Finally Section 353 states that “Everyone who commits buggery, either with a human being or with any other living creature, shall be guilty of felony and be liable to imprisonment for life.”

The original article can be found here.

ICC Issues Arrest Warrant Omar Hassan Al-Bashir

Today, the International Criminal Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar Hassan Al-Bashir.  This is the first time that the ICC has issued such a warrant for a sitting head of state. The office of the United Nations Secretary-General and the United Nations Association of the USA have issued statements regarding the decision.


For further information, please see press releases here and here.

International Criminal Court Accepting Children’s Drawings as Evidence

March 4, 2009

International Criminal Court Accepting Children’s Drawings as Evidence

The International Criminal Court has begun accepting children’s drawings as supporting evidence of alleged crimes taking place in Darfur. The pictures depict the horrors of the region as seen through the eyes of a child provide vivid insight into what is going on on the ground.

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For more on these images and their use by the ICC, please see the BBC’s coverage here.

Not So Grand Bargains, by Morton Abramowitz

Rather than striving for grand compromise, which is often superficial and can lead to greater resentment and conflict, Mr. Abramowitz advocates for a more incremental approach to the world’s biggest crises. He argues that this approach, with political will and vision, better accounts for all the complexities of a situation and, in turn, better addresses the root causes of a problem.

Not So Grand Bargains,
by Morton Abramowitz

Big problems demand bold moves, and in foreign policy bold moves often mean striking “a grand bargain”—a game-hanging proposal designed to change the world, stabilize a region or end a major protracted conflict. It sounds good. But bold ideas are not necessarily good ideas. Pursuing grand bargains is more likely to end up complicating the situation instead of diffusing the crisis. Indeed, the process of developing grand bargains will probably create stagnation and paralyze policymaking.

Unfortunately, few if any grand bargains with war and peace at stake have been reached in recent times. The Arab-Israeli grand bargain got off the drawing board, but the failure to achieve it in 2000 was followed by continuing violence.

More concretely, here are some of today’s grand bargains that political commentators and some diplomats are urging. In crude summary:

·The United States should put together an arrangement that produces a stable Iraqi state, despite the lack of agreement of its citizens on the nature of that state, while resolving the significant interests and troublesome involvements of Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in Iraq’s affairs.

·To stop Iran’s nuclear-weapons program we need to put all the other issues between Iran and the West on the table reasonably quickly, make sure the interests of Israel, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia are served, and preserve the integrity of the non-proliferation agreement.

·If we want to get out of Afghanistan in any politically reasonable time frame, let’s resolve the Kashmir issue between India and Pakistan, establish an effective Pakistani political entity, bring the insurgent infested Federally Administered Tribal Area into Pakistan proper and corral all the decent contending Afghan parties to a powwow.

·Lastly, there is the continuing effort to create two states in Palestine. Violence has punctuated all recent attempts so that even some grand bargain proponents are now saying since everything has failed—from ceasefires and waiting for the ripe time to make peace, to the grand bargain of final-status negotiations—we have to look at the problem with fresh eyes. (That assumes there are fresh eyes and something new to see.)

This is a daunting list with daunting complexities; that’s the nature of a grand bargain. Put everything on the table, subject all basic considerations to an impressive range of discussion and try to limit events from derailing progress, as so often happens in Arab-Israeli negotiations. There are good reasons for pursing a grand bargain. It offers the hope of finality, real peace. The magnitude of the effort can give participants the sense of great achievement, the notion that creating a new world is at hand.

As power diffuses in the world, the United States will find the going even tougher, however charismatic its leadership, in fashioning grand bargains. Perhaps new “aggressive diplomacy” will work some magic. Unaggressive diplomacy certainly has achieved little this past decade.

The simple fact is that grand bargains are difficult to achieve. They are hard to put together because of all the necessary tradeoffs. With everything on the table, complexity is overwhelming and can generate endless bargaining and the constant reopening of issues that were thought settled. The enormous compromises that have to be reached make it difficult to sell grand bargains to publics. Once the effort fails, the situation is likely to worsen. The closest to a grand bargain in recent times was the Dayton agreements, but the contending parties were weak or utterly dependent on the U.S. Indeed Dayton was an incremental effort to establish Balkan stability.

The incremental approach is the dreary alternative to the grand bargain. It worked more or less in the containment of the Soviet Union, the growth and expansion of the EU, the armistice after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the integration of China and the comprehensive peace agreement between North and South Sudan. While incremental agreements on these issues have not always led to any final settlement, they build some confidence among the parties and provide merciful periods of peace or the reduction of tensions. That is not to be sneered at. Incrementalism must be accompanied by vision and a political resolve to address root causes. Their absence is obvious in Africa where we take humanitarian measures in Sudan, Congo and Somalia that satisfy our publics, but do little to move the problem toward better resolution, while proclaiming our dedication to international moral principles.

We are not smart or powerful enough to both conceive and execute all the effort necessary to achieve wide-reaching agreements with parties with whom we lack cultural affinity or deep understanding. Nor does democracy make reaching such broad arrangements any easier; democratic governments change and goalposts are moved by domestic political forces. Incrementalism—the elements of which are involved in any grand bargain—also has its problems, but it is hard to forsake, and the standard must be twofold. First, our approach to seemingly intractable problems must be both realistic and broad. Second, any interim agreement or arrangement must not preclude moving on to the harder aspects of these monumental issues. With these two criteria in place, the incremental approach may not be as dreary as it sounds. We would be wise to listen with critical ear to the siren song of grand bargains.

This article, which is reprinted with permission, can be found here.