In Trinity term last year, I hurried to St. Catz after the Oxford Guild’s email went out. As you may have guessed from the byline, the lady I was there to meet was Tawakkol Karman. She was born on February 7th 1979 in Shar’ab al-Salam, Yemen, later graduating from Sana’a University with a political science degree. She then became a journalist, something that led to her founding the group Women Journalists Without Chains (WJWC) in 2005, an advocacy group for press freedom with which she organised weekly protests from 2007. She was also highly critical of Yemen’s government under President Saleh, especially after moves to give him the role for life. She organised protests against him, something that has led to imprisonment and death threats, including one, according to the New Yorker, from Saleh himself. The Yemeni Revolution in 2011 eventually led to his resignation from office, and saw her receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her campaigning.
(CNN) Today, the investigation led by the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar presented its findings to the Human Rights Council.The mission's exhaustive report defines human rights violations and abuses committed in Kachin, Rakhine and Shan states as "shocking for their horrifying nature and ubiquity" and calls for the investigation and prosecution of senior military officials for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Women human rights defenders meet at the 2017 Nobel Women's Initiative Conference. Credit: author.“It’s just inspiring to have this in our city,” says Jana. She’s 16 years old and has come from Dusseldorf with her mother to the public talk by five female Nobel Peace Prize laureates hosted at the historic Kaiser-Friedrich-Halle in Mönchengladbach, Germany.
