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	Middle East and North Africa: End Curbs on Women’s Mobility by Human Rights Watch   July 2023   Many Middle East and North African countries still prevent women from moving freely in their own country or traveling abroad without the permission of a male guardian, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.   The 119-page report, “Trapped: How Male Guardianship Policies Restrict Women’s Travel and Mobility in the Middle East and North Africa,” says that although women’s rights activists have succeeded in securing women’s increased freedoms in many countries in the region, old and new restrictions require women to seek permission from their male guardian – typically their father, brother, or husband – to move within their country, obtain a passport, or travel abroad. Human Rights Watch also found that in a number of countries, women cannot travel abroad with their children on an equal basis with men.   “From leaving the home to leaving the country, authorities in the Middle East and North Africa are imposing varying restrictions on women’s right to freedom of movement,” said Rothna Begum, senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Women in the region are fighting against restrictions that authorities often claim are for their protection, but in reality, deprive women of their rights and enable men to control and abuse them at will.”   The report is based on a comparative analysis of dozens of laws, regulations, and policies, as well as information provided by lawyers, activists, and women in 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa.   Male guardianship policies in the region, which also exist beyond the Middle East, have been influenced by a broader history of laws and traditions around the world, including European legal traditions, that gave or still give men control over women’s lives.   Fifteen countries in the region still apply personal status or family laws that require women to either “obey” their husbands, live with them, or seek their permission to leave the marital home, work, or travel. Courts can order women to return to their marital homes or lose their right to spousal maintenance.   In some countries, these rules are becoming more entrenched. In March 2022, Saudi Arabia issued its first written Personal Status Law, which codified the long-standing practice of requiring women to obey their husband “in a reasonable manner” or lose financial support from their husbands if they refuse to live in the marital home “without a legitimate excuse.”   Women can be arrested or detained or forced to return home if male guardians in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia report that they are “absent” from their homes. In Saudi Arabia and Yemen, women are still not allowed to leave prison without a male guardian’s approval.   In countries experiencing conflict, some armed groups have imposed guardianship restrictions in areas under their control. In parts of Syria under the control of some armed groups, women are required to be accompanied by a mahram (husband or other close male relative). Houthi authorities who control parts of Yemen have increasingly required women to travel with a mahram or to provide their male guardian’s written approval. Such rules have forced many female Yemeni staff at nongovernmental organizations and United Nations agencies to leave their jobs, losing much-needed income for their families.   While women’s rights activists in the region have made some gains, they continue to fight against discriminatory mobility restrictions. In 2018, following decades of advocacy and activism, Saudi Arabia allowed women to drive, but other restrictions remain. Women in Iran continue their decades-long fight against the mandatory hijab, a central feature of the nationwide “women, life, freedom” protests that erupted after the death in custody of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in September 2022.   Some state universities, including in Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, require women to show they have male guardian permission before they can go on field trips or stay at or leave campus accommodations or grounds. In some countries, women may also face discrimination trying to rent apartments or stay in hotels if they are not married or do not have a male guardian’s permission.   In a positive advance, most governments in the region now allow women to obtain passports and travel abroad without requiring guardian permission. In August 2019, after much campaigning by Saudi women’s rights activists, Saudi authorities amended its rules to allow women over age 21, like men, to obtain passports and travel without guardian permission.   Iran, Qatar, and Yemen remain outliers. In Iran, married women must show their husband’s permission to obtain a passport, and to travel. In Qatar, interior ministry rules require unmarried Qatari women under age 25 to show permission from their male guardians to travel abroad; while Qatari men from age 18 do not. Yemen’s de facto policy requires Yemeni women to show their male guardian’s permission to obtain a passport.   Qatar also allows male guardians to apply to a court to impose travel bans against any of their female relatives, including their wives. Authorities in Iran, Gaza (Palestine), Saudi Arabia, and Yemen also allow male guardians to ban women’s travel abroad.   Some restrictions are relatively new. Hamas authorities in Gaza issued restrictions in February 2021 that means an unmarried woman, even if able to leave Gaza amid sweeping Israeli and Egyptian movement restrictions, can be prevented from traveling as soon as her male guardian applies for a court-ordered ban.   In August 2022, Houthi authorities in Yemen, who control large parts of the country, expanded restrictions so that women cannot travel or leave their areas within the country or travel abroad without a mahram.   In May 2023, Libya’s Internal Security Agency, a body linked to the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity, one of the two governments in Libya vying for legitimacy and control, began requiring Libyan women traveling without a male escort to complete a detailed form about the reasons for their travel and past travel.   Women can also face discriminatory restrictions on traveling abroad with their own children. Fourteen countries in the region do not allow women to obtain passports for their own children on an equal basis with men. Nine countries, officially or in practice, require women to obtain permission from the child’s father to travel abroad with their children, while men face no similar requirement.   “Even as women’s rights activists win some freedoms, the authorities seek to take others away, rolling back not just women’s rights, but harming children, families and society,” Begum said. “All authorities in the Middle East and North Africa should eliminate any and all discriminatory restrictions on women’s freedom of movement including all male guardianship rules.”   http://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/18/middle-east-and-north-africa-end-curbs-womens-mobility Visit the related web page
	Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands by ACLU, AP, Freedom United, agencies   A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.   Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.   Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.   They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.   The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.   Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime.   That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.   Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past. In Louisiana, which has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates, men working on the “farm line” still stoop over crops stretching far into the distance.   The number of people behind bars in the United States started to soar in the 1970s, disproportionately hitting people of color. Now, with about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire.   Reporters found people who were hurt or maimed on the job, and also interviewed women who were sexually harassed or abused, sometimes by their civilian supervisors or the correctional officers overseeing them. While it’s often nearly impossible for those involved in workplace accidents to sue, the AP examined dozens of cases that managed to make their way into the court system. Reporters also spoke to family members of prisoners who were killed.   Incarcerated workers typically aren’t covered by the most basic protections, including workers’ compensation and federal safety standards. In many cases, they cannot file official complaints about poor working conditions.   The AP found that U.S. prison labor is in the supply chains of goods being shipped all over the world via multinational companies, including to countries that have been slapped with import bans by Washington in recent years. For instance, the U.S. has blocked shipments of cotton coming from China, a top manufacturer of popular clothing brands, because it was produced by forced or prison labor. But crops harvested by U.S. prisoners have entered the supply chains of companies that export to China.   While prison labor seeps into the supply chains of some companies through third-party suppliers without them knowing, others buy direct. Mammoth commodity traders that are essential to feeding the globe like Cargill, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, Archer Daniels Midland and Consolidated Grain and Barge – which together post annual revenues of more than $400 billion – have in recent years scooped up millions of dollars’ worth of soy, corn and wheat straight from prisons, which compete with local farmers..   “Slavery has not been abolished,” said Curtis Davis, who spent more than 25 years at a penitentiary and is now fighting to change state laws that allow for forced labor in prisons. “It is still operating in present tense,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”   http://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e http://www.aclu.org/publications/captive-labor-exploitation-incarcerated-workers http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang--en/index.htm http://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/ http://www.business-humanrights.org/en/ http://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc5746-contemporary-forms-slavery-affecting-currently-and-formerly   Amend the 13th : Outlaw slavery in the United States. (Freedom United)   It is 2024 and slavery and involuntary servitude is still legal in the United States.   Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution aimed to abolish slavery, but in reality, the amendment allowed slavery to remain legal.   Section I of the amendment reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”   Prison slavery is never the answer   The “Exception Clause”, also known as the Punishment Clause, made it possible for slavery to be used as a method of punishment, allowing the government to legally subject people incarcerated across the United States to forced labor. But what is legal is not what is just.   Incarcerated persons exposed to prison slavery or forced prison labor are coerced into working through the loss of privileges, visitations, earnings, commissary access or the threat of solitary confinement and even being tasered according to one lawsuit.   That is why we are asking states and US Congress to abolish the Punishment Clause in state constitutions and amend the 13th Amendment. The Punishment Clause is not just a glaring fault in the US Constitution — several state constitutions contain identical language.   The forced labor indicators   Forced labor in prisons is often built into “rehabilitation” or “educational” programs. Many who are incarcerated report being threatened with solitary confinement or longer sentences if they refuse to work. On top of this, incarcerated people are often paid nothing at all for their work or mere pennies. With a few rare exceptions, regular prison jobs are still unpaid in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas.”   According to the International Labour Organization, under the 1930 Forced Labour Convention No. 29, forced labor is work undertaken involuntarily under threat of menace or penalty, this also applies to prison labor.   The Punishment Clause has been a blight on the US for over 100 years, creating an economic incentive for increasing incarceration and exploiting incarcerated people as a source of cheap labor.   As Senator Merkley, sponsor of the Abolition Amendment, explains, the Punishment Clause created a financial incentive for mass incarceration throughout history, targeting communities of color in particular:   Following the ratification of the 13th Amendment, including the Punishment Clause, in 1865, Southern jurisdictions arrested Black Americans in large numbers for minor crimes, like loitering or vagrancy, codified in new ‘Black Codes,’ which were only applied to Black Americans.   The Punishment Clause was then used by sheriffs to lease out imprisoned individuals to work landowners’ fields, which in some cases included the very same plantations where they had been enslaved. The practice grew in prevalence and scope to the point that, by 1898, 73% of Alabama’s state revenue came from renting out the forced labor of Black Americans.   The Punishment Clause’s facilitating and incentivizing of minor crime convictions continued to drive the over–incarceration of Black Americans throughout the Jim Crow era.   The United States must reckon with the injustices faced by incarcerated people borne out the Punishment Clause. At the same time, we recognize that this is a first step in tackling the myriad of other state and federal laws excluding incarcerated people from minimum wage and labor rights protection, as well as the need for the public and private sector to divest from facilities that subject incarcerated people to severe labor exploitation.   We are demanding all states and the federal government explicitly outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime in the US and state constitutions — put an end to the Punishment Clause in the United States.   http://www.freedomunited.org/advocate/amendthe13th/ http://www.freedomunited.org/news/prison-seeks-immunity-forced-labor/ http://www.freedomunited.org/news/kdrama-leads-years-of-forced-labor-north-korean-teens/ http://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/01/china-carmakers-implicated-uyghur-forced-labor http://www.freedomunited.org/news/kenyan-hospital-organ-trafficking/
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