The Iranian activist Kaveh Kermanshahi was free on bail in 2010 when an Iranian court sentenced him to four years in prison for his work on Kurdish and women’s rights. Kermanshahi, who was 26 at the time, decided he couldn’t return to prison, where he had been tortured, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for four months after he was arrested earlier that year.
When Namrata, a Bangladeshi Hindu, asked for a glass of water, her husband instead gave her a glass of acid. Today, with her mouth and throat destroyed, she eats through a feeding tube. Having already spent her life savings, her husband disappeared after the attack.
Yet Namrata cannot legally divorce her husband due to Bangladesh’s archaic Hindu family laws.
We stood on the steps inside the Moscow courthouse – the nearby courtroom was jam-packed -- listening as the judge read into a microphone her guilty verdict against three members of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot.
I sat down with Mercedes on a sleepy afternoon in Medellin, Colombia. She was nervous. I was exhausted. Mercedes was my 60th interview with women and girls in Colombia – all of whom survived sexual or family violence, and all of whom had fled their close-knit rural communities for large, anonymous cities because of serious threats to them or their family.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has fully implemented its new directive, announced in January, on immigration detainee transfers. The directive limits ICE’s ability to transfer detainees with nearby immediate family or attorneys of record to other detention facilities.
More than 50 million viewers of the Kony 2012 viral video now know that Joseph Kony, founder and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is a wanted man with the blood of many on his hands.
La hermana Consuelo Morales ha visto un incremento dramático en el número de personas en Monterrey que son torturadas, asesinadas o "desaparecidas" en los cuatro años desde que el Presidente de México envió a las fuerzas armadas para combatir los cárteles de las drogas.
Sister Consuelo Morales has seen the number of people in Monterrey who are tortured, killed, or “disappeared” skyrocket in the four years since Mexico’s president unleashed the military to combat drug cartels.
Anis Hidayah was literally going into labor with her second child when she answered her phone, suspecting it would be a migrant worker needing her help. She was right. The woman had recently returned to Indonesia and said she was being extorted before being allowed to return to her hometown.
Sussan Tahmasebi returned to her native Iran in 1999 for what she thought was a quick trip to reconnect with her roots, but she ended up staying for nearly 10 years, helping develop civil society to defend women’s rights.
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