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AGM WaterFire Action
In the AGM WaterFire Action, we will will march for US ratification of CEDAW in support for the protection of women activists working for social justice. AGM guest defenders Hina Jilani of Pakistan, Peruvian reproductive rights activist Giulia Tamayo León, lesbian activist Tsitsi Tiripano from Zimbabwe, and environmentalist activist Wangari Maathai of Kenya will be among the women whose cases will be profiled in this Action.
We will focus on the cases of Samia Sarwar of Pakistan, shot dead for seeking divorce from her abusive husband against her parent's wishes, and Katia Bengana, a young Algerian woman killed by an armed Islamist group for refusing to wear a veil. We will pay tribute to Rosemary Nelson, one of Northern Ireland's most prominent and outspoken lawyers, whose killing by a car bomb planted by pro-British loyalist guerrillas was compounded by allegations that the British province's predominantly Protestant police force allowed her murder to take place. The action will honor Ingrid Washinawatok, Native American environmentalist, who was murdered in Colombia during a mission to work with an indigenous community resisting the destruction of their ancestral lands by the prospecting and drilling of petroleum.
Candles will be lit in solidarity for the work of Irene Fernandez, prominent Malaysian human rights activist, director and co-founder of an NGO campaigning for the rights of women and migrant farm workers, who was imprisoned and has been on trial since 1996 for exposing abuse and torture in Malaysian detention camps. We will also march and sign petitions on behalf of Rebiya Kadir, a charismatic Chinese delegate to the UN 4th Conference on Women in Beijing, who had her passport confiscated, subjected to police harassment, and detained with the intent to prevent her husband living abroad from making public statements critical of China's treatment of the Uighur ethnic community.
The action will recognize other prominent defenders including Aung San Suu Kyii of Myanmar, who was presented the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her leadership in a democratic struggle for national independence that employed non-violent means to resist a brutal regime and environmentalist Digna Ochoa y Placido, a Mexican human rights lawyer subjected to abduction, interrogation, and who was threatened in her own home for her organization's work on behalf of farmer-ecologists opposed to logging in Guerrero states.
Show your solidarity with these courageous women. Join us in the WaterFire Action as AIUSA continue the international struggle to proclaim women's rights as human rights and write for the following cases today:
