THE WOMEN'S RIGHTS PROJECT

The Women's Rights Project of Human Rights Watch was established in 1990 to work in conjunction with Human Rights Watch's regional divisions to monitor violence against women and discrimination on the basis of sex that is either committed or tolerated by governments. The project grew out of Human Rights Watch's recognition of the epidemic proportions of violence and gender discrimination around the world and of the past failure of human rights organizations, and the international community, to hold governments accountable for abuses of women's basic human rights. The project monitors the performance of specific countries in securing and protecting women's human rights, highlights individual cases of international significance, and serves as a link between women's rights and human rights communities at both national and international level.

Women's Human Rights Developments

This chapter does not evaluate progress in women's human rights throughout the world, but describes developments in countries most closely monitored by the Women's Rights Project in 1993: Peru, the former Yugoslavia, Thailand, Turkey, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan and Brazil.

Peru

In January 1993, the HRW Women's Rights Project and Americas Watch released Untold Terror: Violence Against Women in Peru's Armed Conflict. The report found that both the government security forces and the Shining Path insurgency used violence, including rape and murder, against noncombatant women as a tactic of warfare. Soldiers and police routinely raped women, while the Shining Path often murdered them, either to punish, intimidate, or coerce particular female victims or as part of their efforts to achieve broader political ends. These violations of women's basic rights as well as other human rights abuses routinely went unpunished. Accused rapists are rarely prosecuted and punished. The problem was compounded for rape victims as questions of a woman's "honor," age, and sexual past were considered relevant in judicial proceedings and often discriminated against women victims and unfairly diverted scrutiny away from the accused rapist.

In response to letters of concern from the U.S. Congress which followed the report, President Alberto Fujimori vowed to "drastically punish" soldiers and police officers who committed rape. However, despite his assertions, the pattern of impunity for rapists continued in Peru: Human Rights Watch knew of no case where an active member of the military had been punished for rape. In one incident, known as the Santa Bárbara massacre and detailed in Untold Terror, an army patrol entered several villages in the department of Huancavelica in July 1991 and proceeded to rape women, destroy houses and steal livestock. Fifteen villagers were then taken away and killed. In February 1993, an army lieutenant was sentenced to ten years in prison for abuse of authority and falsehood for his role in the massacre. No military men were prosecuted or punished for the more egregious offenses of rape andmurder. Second Sgt. Dennis Pacheco Zambrano was charged with rape and cattle theft but was acquitted.

New allegations of rape by the police and military emerged in 1993. In January 1993, forty members of the anti-terrorist police were accused of gang-raping and impregnating a twenty-year-old women detained for alleged ties the Shining Path. The woman, María de la Cruz, was detained after appearing with her mother in Lima to testify on behalf of a relative accused of being a member of the Shining Path. Shortly after her detention, she was reportedly taken to a beach outside Lima where she and five other women were raped by police officers over a period of four days. Doctors who examined Ms. de la Cruz found that she conceived while in police custody. Ms. de la Cruz was acquitted of all charges connecting her to the Shining Path by the military courts, but remained in a maximum security prison in Lima while a military prosecutor appealed the decision. In August, Peru's congress, under the auspices of the congressional human rights commission, agreed to conduct an investigation into the case. In another incident, the New York Times reported that soldiers broke into the home of a sixteen-year-old girl on March 22, 1993 in the town of Acayacu and raped her. Another soldier reportedly raped her fourteen-year-old neighbor.

Former Yugoslavia

In January 1993, representatives of the HRW Women's Rights Project and Helsinki Watch traveled to the former Yugoslavia to investigate allegations of widescale rape in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The mission found that rape was being used by Serbian forces as a weapon of terror against non-Serb, civilian women as part of the policy of "ethnic cleansing." To a lesser extent, Croatian and Bosnian Muslim forces also had committed rape against Serbian women. These findings were incorporated into the Helsinki Watch report, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina: Volume II, released in April 1993.

Women refugees from Bosnia-Hercegovina described being raped in their homes or in the streets as soldiers swept through their villages, destroying property and attacking civilians. Other women were arrested and raped during the course of interrogation or as part of the torture they were subjected to in military-directed detention camps. In some areas, women and girls were detained in abandoned houses or municipal buildings, where they were raped and abused repeatedly for days or even weeks on end. The effect of rape was often to ensure that women and their families would flee and never return.

Women victims of rape reported being threatened with forcible impregnation. A number of women recounted that, as they were being assaulted, rapists taunted them with ethnic slurs or stated their intention to impregnate their victims. J., a thirty-nine-year-old Croatian woman who was raped by a reserve captain of the self-proclaimed "Serbian Republic" in the Omarska detention camp, told us, "They said I was an Ustasa and that I needed to give birth to a Serb-that I would then be different."

The failure to punish rapists was as consistent and widespread as rape itself. Despite the many reports of rape, Human Rights Watch found no evidence that any soldier or member of aparamilitary group had been punished or held to account for raping women and girls. Not only did military commanders fail to punish soldiers who rape, in many instances they themselves committed rape or organized "rape camps." Human Rights Watch released "Prosecute Now!" on August 1, 1993, detailing cases of human rights abuses, including rape, for which there has evidence implicating officers who committed abuses, including rape, or turned a blind eye to the abuses committed by their subordinates.

Thailand

In February 1993, the Women's Rights Project and Asia Watch traveled to Thailand to document the trafficking of Burmese women and girls into Thailand for the purposes of forced prostitution. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Burmese women and girls were believed to be held in Thai brothels, primarily in the northern provinces, Bangkok, and Ranong Province in the south. Expecting to work in restaurants and factories, most of them became trapped in brothels instead, under deplorable conditions that amounted to a modern form of slavery. The Burmese were being held in debt bondage and compelled to have sex with as many as ten to fifteen customers a day in order to pay off their recruitment, transportation and living expenses. Not only did the local police fail to enforce Thai laws against trafficking and prostitution, but they were often directly involved in trafficking as drivers and clients and were known to take protection money from brothel owners.

In the 1992 State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the State Department acknowledged that "senior [Thai] government officials themselves have cited corruption as a major factor in police willingness to turn a blind eye to the problem. Reliable sources report that police can earn $120 to $200 per month in protection fees." The department's analysis failed, however, to identify more invidious forms of participation by local police and border patrols in sex trafficking.

During 1993, the government of Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai began to crack down on forced and child prostitution, with very mixed results. While the highly-publicized brothel raids heightened public awareness of the problem, the crackdown in fact discriminated against the Burmese women and girls. Whereas the women were arrested during raids on brothels, detained and often deported as illegal immigrants, the brothel owners, pimps and traffickers were rarely arrested and prosecuted. At most, some police implicated in sex trafficking were transferred. With the exception of one 1992 case involving the murder of a Thai prostitute in the province of Songkla, no Thai official had been prosecuted or imprisoned for involvement in prostitution or trafficking as of November 1993.

The ordeal of the Burmese women and girls did not end with their "rescue" from the brothels, as the detention and deportation process was rife with additional abuses. Conditions at some of the immigration detention centers fell drastically short of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. The Bangkok detention center, where adults and minors were held together, was so overcrowded that detainees had to take turns just to lie down head to toe. At the Kanchanaburi detention center,there were consistent allegations of rape and physical abuse during 1992 and 1993. Furthermore, many of the women we interviewed at the detention centers did not know what, if any, charges were pending against them. Most did not understand the Thai language and they were rarely provided with translators during their hearings and sentencing. The length of detention, in many cases, was dependent on the women's ability to cajole or in some instances bribe their way out.

With the alarming spread of AIDS in Thailand, Burmese women and girls in closed brothels were at extreme risk of HIV infection, since very few had the power to negotiate either condom use or the number of customers. During 1993, an otherwise commendable national AIDS prevention campaign largely failed to reach the Burmese women in the brothels. NGOs and health care workers estimated that 50 to 70 percent of the Burmese women and girls in the brothels in northern Thailand were HIV-positive. Notwithstanding widely-circulated reports of Burmese government persecution of people who were HIV-positive, Burmese women and girls infected with the AIDS virus were summarily repatriated. In September 1922, the Thai government completed a high-profile official deportation of ninety-five Burmese women and girls, half of whom were subsequently reported by the Burmese authorities to be HIV-positive and detained for treatment. As of November, there had been no official Thai mission to verify the status of those returnees.

Turkey

In July 1993, the Women's Rights Project and Helsinki Watch conducted a mission to Turkey to investigate reports that police and other state actors were forcing women and girls to undergo gynecological exams to determine whether they were virgins. The social stigma associated with the exams and the lack of appropriate complaint procedures made the exact incidence of such exams difficult to determine. However, numerous Turkish women, doctors, and lawyers told us that the threat-and in some cases the actual imposition-of forced virginity control exams followed Turkish women throughout their lives.

We found that police and other state authorities had abused broadly-worded statutes regulating the treatment of detainees and pertaining to the duties and responsibilities of the police to monitor public behavior-none of which specifically required anything resembling virginity exams-by compelling women and girls, often against their will, to undergo exams to assess the status of their hymens. A report planned to follow-up on the trip would document several incidents in which women in detention were forcibly examined before and after interrogation, police stopped women on the street for engaging in "immoral" behavior and threatened them with virginity "control," and local public health authorities forced hospital patients to submit to compulsory vaginal exams. The virginity of men was never investigated, even by superficial questioning.

In one case, two young, female journalists traveling in southeastern Turkey were detained by the police. Prior to being interrogated about whether they were carriers for the KurdishWorkers' Party (PKK), the women were taken to the local state hospital for virginity examinations. At first the women refused to be examined. According to the women's testimony, the police responded "[w]e do this to all of the women we detain, even if they are detained only for two hours. We do it two times-when we detain women and again before we release them. We do this to protect ourselves, so that you won't say we raped you." The doctor then cautioned them, "You'd better do this or they will force your legs apart for you." Both women were forcibly examined twice.

In May 1992, two female high school students in western Anatolia reportedly killed themselves after being forced by school authorities and family members to submit to virginity exams. The girls, along with several of their female classmates, were taken by school authorities to have their hymens examined after being seen picnicking in the woods with boys. When the suicides became public, Turkish activists protested against the imposition of virginity exams and decried such exams as an extreme manifestation of state-tolerated violence against women and discrimination. According to local activists, government officials dismissed the cases as isolated incidents.

In interviews with the Women's Rights Project, Turkish police officials denied that woman in custody were forced to undergo virginity exams. However, we obtained several forms signed by local police authorities directing that individual women in detention have their virginity determined by a doctor.

Kenya

In July 1993, the Women's Rights Project and Africa Watch conducted a mission to Kenya, to investigate allegations of sexual abuse of Somali refugee women in camps in Kenyan territory. We found that from January through August 1993, 192 rapes were reported to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which administers the Kenyan camps.

In a majority of reported cases, refugee women and girls were violently attacked by unknown armed bandits at night or when they went to the outskirts of the camp to herd goats or collect firewood. These bandits increasingly joined forces with former Somali military men or fighters from the various warring factions who launched raids across the Kenya-Somali border. To a lesser extent, refugee women reported attacks by Kenyan police officers posted in the area, who were responsible for seven of the reported rape cases. UNHCR estimated that reported cases amount to only one-tenth the number of actual rapes occurring in the camps, at the hands of either bandits, warring parties or local police.

Somali women as old as fifty and girls as young as four were subjected to violence and sexual assault. Most of the cases involved gang-rape at gunpoint, some by as many as seven men at a time. Some women were raped twice or three times in the camps. In the vast majority of cases, female rape victims were also robbed, brutally beaten, knifed or shot. Those women refugees who had been circumcised often had their vaginal openings torn or cut by their attackers. Many suffered ongoing medical and psychological problems.

For nearly half of the women who reported being raped, rapewas a factor in causing them to become refugees. Eighty-five of the 192 reported rape cases involved women who were raped in Somalia before fleeing to Kenya. Once in Kenya, women were again targeted with rape as a particularly effective form of intimidation, further destabilizing the refugee population and rendering women refugees in particular vulnerable to exploitation for money, goods and perverse sexual gratification.

The Kenyan government's response to rising sexual assault in its camps was wholly inadequate. The authorities did not provide sufficient protection or security to the refugee camps, nor did they prosecute a single individual responsible for rape. Moreover, the office of the President callously accused the Somali refugee women of fabricating the rape claims to "attract sympathy and give the government negative publicity" and asserted, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that the police had received no rape reports. Relief officials, including UNHCR, belatedly began to establish programs designed to respond to the sexual assault of women refugees, but services were still severely limited, and relief organizations had made insufficient efforts to protect the women refugees against rape in the first instance.

Like Human Rights Watch as a whole, the HRW Women's Rights Project is committed to conducting sustained monitoring efforts in the countries on which it reports. In addition to the new country studies discussed above, we also conducted follow-up efforts in three countries we visited in 1991 and 1992: Kuwait, Pakistan and Brazil.

Kuwait

As documented in Punishing the Victim: Rape and Mistreatment of Asian Maids in Kuwait, a report released by the Women's Rights Project and Middle East Watch in August 1992, over 2,000 Asian guestworkers employed as maids in Kuwait fled from abusive employers following that country's liberation. Most of these women were from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India and the Philippines and were drawn to Kuwait by the hope of higher wages. Instead, they experienced physical and sexual assault, debt bondage, passport deprivation, illegal confinement, and contract violations.

The Kuwaiti government did little to address the Asian maids' plight despite its full knowledge of their deplorable situation. A decree to regulate Kuwaiti recruitment agencies was not consistently enforced. A draft bill to include maids in labor laws was left pending for months.

Following the report's release, the HRW Women's Rights Project learned that many women continued to seek refuge in their embassies and to complain of abuse and mistreatment at the hands of their employers. The Kuwaiti government's efforts to repatriate women who had fled abusive employers did not address the underlying problem or provide legal restitution. In July 1993, approximately 400 Filipina and one hundred Indian and Sri Lankan maids who had sought refuge in their respective embassies were repatriated at Kuwaiti government expense. In August 1993, the Philippines Embassy reported that over 120 women were staying in the embassy. More women arrived daily.

In September, another 100 Indian and Sri Lankan maids weresent home. Although the repatriation of maids may have solved the women's immediate need to return home, the Kuwaitis conducted the returns without gathering in advance adequate evidence of the alleged abuses. Thus, once the women left Kuwait their allegations of abuse and mistreatment were effectively dropped.

To our knowledge, only one case of abuse was successfully prosecuted as of November 1993. Sonia Panama, a twenty-three-year-old Filipina working as a maid, died on March 8, 1993 after being admitted to the hospital with severe injuries. Press reports indicated that hospital staff found signs that she had been beaten and raped. One ear was virtually severed, cigarette burns covered her body, and there were bite marks on her stomach. In July 1993, Panama's employers, a Kuwaiti husband and Lebanese wife, were sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for causing her death through ill-treatment.

Pakistan and Brazil

The Women's Rights Project also conducted follow-up missions on its previous work on trafficking in women in Pakistan and violence against women in Brazil.

From June to August 1993, the project and Asia Watch conducted preliminary research in Pakistan which indicated that, although brothel raids and arrests of Bangladeshi women trafficked into Pakistan for prostitution appeared to have diminished, Bangladeshi women continued to be trafficked across the Pakistani border and to be arrested, either as prostitutes or as illegal immigrants, once in Pakistan. In one case we investigated, twenty-year-old Saira Bano was abducted from Bangladesh and taken with a group of twenty to thirty other Bengali women on a bus to India and ultimately across the border into Pakistan. Saira was arrested in Karachi on March 24, 1992, prior to being sold into prostitution, and spent the next twelve months in detention. On February 4, 1993 she was released to Darul Aman, a quasi-penal institution, where she remained as of November 1993. She had no papers to prove that she was Bengali and no financial means to return home.

Both Bangladesh and Pakistan are signatories to the Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others which, among other things, obligates states parties to repatriate victims of trafficking and to provide temporary care and maintenance until repatriation takes place. While the convention requires a state party to pay for repatriation at least to the frontier of the victim's country of origin, unfortunately it only requires repatriation "after agreement is reached with the state of destination." In general, the Bangladesh High Commissioner in Pakistan consistently refused applications like Saira's on the grounds that, without documentation, the women could not prove they are Bengali.

In November the Women's Rights Project and Americas Watch launched a mission to follow up on violence against women in Brazil, with particular emphasis on the forced prostitution of Brazilian girls in the Amazon region.

The International Response

International work and, in particular, work at the United Nationscontinued to be a crucial element in efforts to advance the protection and promotion of women's human rights worldwide. At the 1993 session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, in Vienna, which the Women's Rights Project attended, the commission called for the full integration of women's rights into the work of the World Conference on Human Rights in June and adopted a draft declaration on violence against women to be considered by the United Nations General Assembly in November. At its 1993 session in Geneva, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution calling for the "full integration of women's rights into the human rights mechanisms of the United Nations," and agreed to consider the appointment of a Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women at its 1994 session.

Following the U.N. Women's Commission and Human Rights Commission meetings, the Women's Rights Project circulated to government delegates a series of talking points in support of the appointment of a Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women to be used in advance of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights. We called for the rapporteur's mandate to encompass sex discrimination as well as violence on the grounds that gender-based violence cannot be effectively understood or remedied if it is examined separately from gender discrimination. In May, we wrote a letter to Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck assessing the draft U.S. human rights action plan for Vienna. We called in particular for the U.S. more thoroughly to integrate women's human rights throughout its action plan, rather than artificially segregating "women's issues" from the plan's substantive sections and to more vigorously support the appointment of a special rapporteur.

At the World Conference itself, the Women's Rights Project participated in several NGO working groups and panels addressing women's human rights and worked closely with women's rights activists worldwide to integrate women's rights into the conference's final declaration. In a victory for women's human rights activists, the Vienna Declaration affirmed that "the human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in the political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community."

In October 1993, the U.N.'s Division for the Advancement of Women invited the Women's Rights Project to participate in an expert group meeting on measures to eradicate violence against women. Women's rights activists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and North America analyzed various forms of gender-based violence worldwide and crafted recommendations for national, regional and international bodies to combat such violence more effectively as part of efforts to combat human rights abuse more generally.

U.S. Policy

Women's human rights assumed a higher profile in U.S. foreign policy during 1993, largely due to increased attention from theClinton administration, revelations about atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, and the World Conference on Human Rights. Heightened visibility, however, did not translate into consistent and effective demands for accountability. The U.S. government's response to violations of women's human rights in particular countries continued to suffer from a lack of coordination among the many federal agencies and bureaus with responsibility for foreign policy.

At the international level, the United States supported the U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution calling for the full integration of women's rights into the U.N.'s human rights mechanisms and co-sponsored the draft declaration on violence against women. The U.S. also played a significant role in advancing women's human rights at the official U.N. Human Rights Conference in Vienna. Secretary of State Warren Christopher set the tone for the U.S. at Vienna by calling it "a moral imperative" to guarantee to women their human rights. Firm advocacy by the U.S. delegation helped assure that key components of the U.S. human rights action plan concerning women's human rights were incorporated into the Vienna Declaration.

However, for these commitments to have more than symbolic significance, the U.S. must develop concrete monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck, in testimony before the House Subcommittee on International Security, International Organizations and Human Rights in October, committed the administration to taking the following steps in this regard: appoint a staff person within the Human Rights Bureau to work full-time on women's human rights issues; assess U.S. aid and trade relations, and votes at the multilateral lending institutions with regard to human rights; direct U.S.-funded democracy and administration of justice programs to support women's rights in new and emerging democracies; and incorporate abuses targeted at women into all relevant sections of the State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

Assistant Secretary Shattuck also made specific pledges with respect to U.S. relations with the U.N. The Human Rights Bureau committed itself to advocate U.S. ratification of U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); to support the appointment of a U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and a U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights; and to press for the assembly of evidence for prosecuting systematic rape as a war crime and a tool of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.

Assistant Secretary Shattuck's commitment to the appointment of a senior advisor on women's human rights to the State Department Bureau for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs came in response to recommendations introduced by Reps. Olympia Snowe and Howard Berman and Sen. Paul Simon as amendments to the 1994 State Department authorization bill, which was awaiting passage by Congress as of November. Among other things, the proposed senior advisor would be tasked "to assure that the issue of abuses against women, along with human rights issues generally, are a factor in determining bilateral assistance as well as United States votes at the multilateral development banks."

Even before the Clinton administration announced its intent to ratify CEDAW, members of Congress were urging ratification. In April, sixty-eight senators wrote to President Clinton asking him to take the necessary steps to ratify CEDAW. The letter noted that "[d]elayed action on the Convention only signals to the international community that the U.S. doesn't recognize discrimination of women as a violation of human rights." In the House, Representatives Woolsey and Hamilton introduced a Resolution calling on President Clinton to move expeditiously on CEDAW.

Notwithstanding these welcome developments, the record of the U.S. executive branch's responses to country-specific cases of violations of women's human rights clearly indicated that the U.S. could and should engage in more vigorous and systematic international and bilateral initiatives to promote and protect women's human rights.

The Clinton administration at times missed important opportunities to exercise U.S. leverage to ensure the protection of women's human rights. For example, the State Department in September approved the release of $3.73 million in security assistance to Kenya to enhance security on its border with Somalia. In his September 24, 1993 press statement accompanying the release, the State Department's spokesperson said that "the United States has welcomed the Kenyan government's efforts to improve conditions along the border, and believes that those efforts merit support." This decision to disburse security assistance should have been, but was not, accompanied by pressure on the Kenyan government to adopt specific measures to protect Somali refugees from widespread abuses, including rape of Somali women refugees. Such abuses had been documented by UNHCR, Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations over a period of months. On the positive side, the Refugee Bureau responded in November to a funding appeal from UNHCR for a special project to assist Somali women refugees by allocating $250,000 in humanitarian aid directly to UNHCR.

Thailand was another case where the U.S. has failed to integrate women's human rights into its bilateral relations. Even as the U.S. spent some $4 million in fiscal year 1993 to combat drug trafficking in Thailand, the State Department never publicly raised the problem of sex trafficking with the Thai government. Again, Congress was more active in advocating the human rights of women trafficking victims. In its report accompanying the 1994 foreign appropriations bill, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the first time raised concerns about the illegal trafficking of Burmese women and children into Thailand for the purposes of forced prostitution. While acknowledging the Thai government's periodic efforts to rescue women held captive in brothels, the committee also noted that "these efforts have unfortunately led to the arrest and detention of Burmese women as illegal immigrants rather than to the arrest of brothel owners and officials, often local police, involved in the trafficking." The committee called upon the Thai government "to prosecute those responsible for the trafficking, forced labor, and physical and sexual abuse of these [Burmese] women."

By contrast, U.S. advocacy to establish an international tribunal to prosecute war crimes in the former Yugoslavia hasconsistently taken into account crimes against women. In February, in her statement supporting U.N. Security Council Resolution 808 to establish an ad hoc tribunal, Ambassador Madeleine Albright specifically condemned rape as one aspect of "ethnic cleansing." The U.S. also successfully nominated a woman, Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, to one of the eleven judgeships on the tribunal. In addition, the State Department drafted rules of evidence and procedures for the tribunal that included a ban on inquiry into survivors' past sexual histories. These rules were under consideration by the panel of judges.

Various members of Congress circulated resolutions to condemn rape and forced pregnancy as war crimes and crimes against humanity, and to urge the U.N. to investigate expeditiously all forms of abuse. Despite such efforts, U.N. progress toward establishing a war crimes tribunal was shamefully slow; as of November, the staff had not even been selected. Meanwhile, evidence disappeared and witnesses dispersed.

In some cases, Congress played an important role in placing the U.S. on record and pressuring foreign governments on significant abuses of women's human rights. In March, for example, following the release of the Women's Rights Project/Americas Watch report on Peru, twenty-three senators and forty-two representatives wrote to President Alberto Fujimori to deplore the widespread rape and killing with impunity of civilian women during that country's protracted internal conflict. Beyond condemning both the Peruvian government and the Shining Path for consistently failing to discipline their combatants, the signatories criticized the Peruvian government's maneuvers to retaliate against Raquel Martín Castillo de Mejía, whose case was detailed in our report, for speaking out against the military for raping her.

Congress also assumed the lead in pressing for Japanese accountability for past abuses against women. While welcoming the Japanese government's recent admission of official involvement in the establishment of a vast network of military brothels during World War II, members of the House of Representatives called upon Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa to take additional steps. To ensure justice for women who were forced to work as prostitutes to the Japanese military during World War II, they urged the Japanese government "to cooperate fully [with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Sexual Slavery] in order to provide a complete account of the 'comfort women' policy." The letter also supported the demands of numerous former "comfort women" for official apologies and compensation from the Japanese government as part of the overall process of accountability.

In the case of Kuwait, the U.S. engaged in high-level discussions regarding abuses against Asian domestic workers by their Kuwaiti employers. However, little changed in Kuwait during the fourteen months since we first reported on this problem. Additional pressure from the U.S. government was needed to ensure that Kuwait extended the protection of labor laws to domestic workers and prosecuted employers for criminal behavior.

As in previous years, Human Rights Watch testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee in March 1993 on the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Whilecommending the 1992 Country Reports for generally improved coverage of women's human rights, we reiterated that more data was needed on violence against women to underscore the enormity of this problem, and that abuses against women should be more consistently integrated into all appropriate sections on substantive rights, rather than concentrated under "discrimination."

The accurate categorization of abuses against women was directly pertinent to the application of U.S. human rights law to women's human rights. U.S. human rights law mandates sanctions only against those countries that consistently commit "gross violations," including torture, degrading treatment and flagrant violations of the right to life, but not "discrimination."

To generate urgent support for individual women who were at imminent risk of abuse, or who were seeking legal redress for past abuse, Sen. Patty Murray and Reps. Jan Meyers and Joe Moakley initiated the Congressional Working Group on International Women's Human Rights. The cases, to be identified and researched by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations, are also to highlight patterns of state-sponsored or state-tolerated violence or severe discrimination against women that merit Congressional attention beyond action on the individual cases.

The Work of the Women's Rights Project

The Women's Rights Project and Americas Watch continued advocacy to end violence against women in Peru by government forces and Shining Path insurgents, which we first reported in our report, Untold Terror. In February, we sent letters to Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori and the Shining Path leadership to condemn ongoing attacks on civilian women as a tactic of war. We called upon both parties to investigate and discipline their combatants. In May, the Women's Rights Project and Americas Watch wrote to President Fujimori to protest the alleged rape of twenty-three-year-old María de la Cruz by Peru's anti-terrorist police, DINCOTE. Ms. de la Cruz, who became pregnant, was still being held in maximum security prison as of November, even though the military court acquitted her of all connections to the Shining Path.

In July, responding to new threats of extradition and trial-in-absentia by the Peruvian government against Raquel Martín de Mejía, the Women's Rights Project and Americas Watch appealed to Peruvian Ambassador to Sweden Jaime Stiglich Berninzon to write to his government stating that there was no information that showed any links whatsoever between Ms. Martín de Mejía and Sendero Luminoso. Ms. Martín had been living in exile in Sweden after being raped by Peruvian soldiers in 1989. The false charges against Ms. Martín were still pending in November.

Human Rights Watch called on the United Nations to prosecute rape and forced pregnancy as war crimes in the Bosnian war. In a February 1993 letter to the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the Women's Rights Project urged the U.S. to press the commission for a resolution recognizing explicitly that rape is a war crime and calling for the establishment of an international war crimes tribunal to ensure the prosecution of war crimes, including rape, in the former Yugoslavia. The commission subsequently adopted such a resolution. The project also assistedcongressional efforts to draft similar resolutions and to call on the administration and its U.N. delegation to support the tribunal and to ensure that prosecuting rape remained a priority. When, in March 1993, the U.S. released its proposed charter for the war crimes tribunal, the Women's Rights Project highlighted issues pertaining to the prosecution of sexual abuses in its contributions to Human Rights Watch's commentary on the charter's provisions.

Once the U.N. began the process of appointing judges and the chief prosecutor of the tribunal, the project worked to submit the names of qualified female candidates for these crucial positions. The U.N. General Assembly ultimately selected two women-Elizabeth Odio Benito of Costa Rica and Gabrielle Kirk McDonald of the United States-to sit on the tribunal's eleven-judge panel. The project continued its efforts to ensure women's participation in the U.N. Commission of Experts reviewing evidence of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, and in the tribunal's prosecutorial team.

The project participated actively in two non-governmental ad hoc coalitions against war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. The coalitions called attention to the situation of women refugees and victims of human rights abuse in Bosnia, worked with the U.S. government and the U.N. to condemn and seek eventual prosecution of war crimes against women, and urged that international relief efforts respond to the needs of victims of sexual violence and torture. Human Rights Watch also filed an amicus brief supporting a civil suit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Bosnian victims of human rights abuses and charging the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, with responsibility for rape and other gross violations of humanitarian law.

Just prior to the State Department's announcement in September that the U.S. would release $3.73 million in security assistance to Kenya, the Women's Rights Project urged the department to appropriate a portion of the funds to protection of women refugees against rape. Following the aid's release, we met with State Department officials to express concern that no portion of the approved funds-for the purchase of spare parts for military helicopters, parts for heavy equipment transporters, equipment for drilling water wells in the border region and related training and services-was allocated to address the specific protection needs of Somali refugees, particularly women refugees, in Kenya. The Women's Rights Project strongly urged the State Department to press the Kenyan government to meet its international refugee protection obligations, and to prosecute all wrongdoers.

In a follow-up letter to the State Department's Kenya desk officer, the project urged the administration to press the Kenyan government to fulfill its obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention by committing to specific refugee safety measures. At a minimum, such measures should include additional physical barriers around the refugee camps, protection for women who report sexual violence from reprisal, prosecution and punishment of all wrongdoers to the full extent of the law, and collaboration with UNHCR to enhance camp security and to provide legal and medical assistance to rape survivors.

In a May 1993 letter to Kuwait's Minister of Justice, the Women's Rights Project and Middle East Watch called on thegovernment to take steps to respond to the problem, including (1) revising labor laws to afford maids the same level of protection as other private sector employees; (2) ceasing the wrongful arrest and detention of Asian maids; (3) establishing adequate shelter for women who allege abuse and mistreatment until their cases are resolved; (4) explicitly denouncing and punishing passport deprivation; and (5) investigating and prosecuting all those accused of rape and assault.

In September, the Women's Rights Project offered testimony at a hearing held by the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights, on women's human rights and U.S. foreign policy. The Women's Rights Project emphasized the need to advance beyond the enumeration of violations and dependence on ad hoc responses, toward the systematic integration of women's human rights into U.S. foreign policy.

In October, the Women's Rights Project submitted to Secretary of State Warren Christopher a memorandum with extensive recommendations to fully integrate women's human rights into all aspects of U.S. foreign policy. The memorandum suggested ways to increase the State Department's capacity to promote and protect women's human rights, and to improve coordination across federal agencies involved in U.S. foreign policy. We also recommended ways to enhance the effectiveness of U.N. mechanisms in safeguarding women's human rights. To implement these suggestions, we fully endorsed Secretary Shattuck's plan to designate a full-time staff person within the Human Rights Bureau to work on women's human rights, with the proviso that this individual must be appointed at a senior level with sufficient authority and staff.

In addition to our country-specific work, and our work on national and international policy regarding women's human rights generally, we continued to take up specific women's human rights cases which had broad ramifications for women's human rights. In March, the project wrote to President Daniel arap Moi protesting harassment and threats against Prof. Wangari Maathai, an outspoken advocate for democratic reform in Kenya and co-founder of the Tribal Clashes Resettlement Volunteer Service, for her criticism of the government's handling of the ethnic violence in the Rift Valley.

In April, the project and Middle East Watch issued an urgent press release strenuously protesting the Moroccan government's decision to ban a demonstration against sexual harassment. Scheduled to occur in the wake of the sensational trial of Moustapha Tabet, a senior police official sentenced to death for abducting and raping over 500 women, the march was to make the point that Tabet could have abused so many only because the government generally condoned police abuse of authority.

In October 1992, the Women's Rights Project and Middle East Watch joined other advocates in petitioning the Canadian government to grant political asylum to Nada, a Saudi woman fleeing gender-based persecution in her country. Nada fled Saudi Arabia because she feared persecution as a woman who had refused to heed the travel, dress and employment restrictions imposed on women by the government and strictly enforced by the religious police, who are empowered to flog transgressors on the street. On January 29, 1993,Canada's Minister of Employment and Immigration, Bernard Valcourt, finally granted Nada asylum.

Our work on Nada's case led us to engage in work on women refugees issues more generally. Like Nada, many women become refugees in order to escape gender-based persecution. Often these women are subject to further persecution as female refugees. Yet current refugee law does not explicitly recognize gender-based persecution. Thus, women seeking asylum in the United States due to their well-founded fear of such persecution may be presumptively excluded because the basis of their claims is not acknowledged by law.

Even as UNHCR and human rights organizations were beginning to document and analyze the particular problems that confronted refugee and displaced women, the administration was proposing to reform the U.S. asylum system in ways that were likely to have a negative impact on women's ability to seek refuge in the U.S. Measures under review included a higher, more difficult standard for establishing persecution claims in summary proceedings, and drastic limits on access to judicial review of asylum claims. Commenting on the administration's proposals, which were introduced in the Senate by Sen. Edward Kennedy and in the House by Rep. Jack Brooks, Rep. Nancy Pelosi argued that "refugee women fleeing gender-related persecution, often victimized by rape, will be unable, under the proposed legislation, to present evidence in a summary hearing sufficient to meet the 'credible fear' test."

Echoing Rep. Pelosi's main criticisms, the Women's Rights Project wrote to Vice-President Al Gore on August 10, 1993 to express concern that "the [legislation's] proposed expedited exclusion proceedings could effectively deny women the time and resources necessary to demonstrate the legitimacy of their [asylum] claims." The Women's Rights Project further urged that any amendment to U.S. asylum law include an explicit recognition of gender-based persecution as a grounds for asylum.

In March 1993, the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board promulgated guidelines for considering the petitions of women refugee claimants fearing gender-related persecution. The guidelines explicitly state that the definition of refugee may be interpreted to include women who demonstrate a well-founded fear of gender-related persecution. The Women's Rights Project contributed during the year to efforts underway in the United States to draft guidelines similar to those adopted in Canada. The draft U.S. guidelines were designed to assist immigration officers in analyzing and interpreting gender-based persecution claims. The project's participation in drafting the guidelines was rooted in the work of Human Rights Watch documenting both gender-specific human rights abuses and the plight of women refugees in, for example, the former Yugoslavia, Kenya, and Bangladesh.