Afghan Women Call for Democracy and Social Justice

By the end of 2014, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission will be concluded. Even after ten years of the establishment of the Karzai government and the fall of the Taliban, Afghan women continue to be among the worst off in the world.

By Nele Rissmann

Afghanistan 2012. A young Afghan girl, Zahra is 15 years old. Grown up in the valley of Panjshir -a province about 100 km northeast of Kabul- she was born in a little village to a traditional Pashto speaking Afghan family. Zahra has fond memories of her childhood: she spent her days playing in the fields and swam together with other kids in a pond. At the age of 13 Zahra’s father forced her to marry a 30-year-old man. However, she refused, and as a consequence, Zahra’s life changed dramatically. Her father and brothers started to abuse her. They beat her, sometimes until the point of unconsciousness, while keeping her imprisoned in her own home. Three months later, Zahra managed to escape and was picked up by a safe house in Kabul.

The need to defend of women’s rights was cited by NATO as one of the primary motivations, after the need to defeat the Taliban and to root out al Qaeda, for the 2001 invasion and subsequent commitment to rehabilitate Afghanistan. In December 2001, they determined in the Bonn Agreement: “these interim arrangements are intended as a first step toward the establishment of a broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative government”. By the end of 2014, the ISAF mission will be concluded and almost all international forces are scheduled to be out of Afghanistan. A NATO force will be left behind in order to help with the training of Afghan forces. On the 20th and 21st of May 2012, Heads of State and government, as well as Foreign Ministers and Defence Ministers met at the NATO Summit in Chicago. The declaration of the summit contains a review of the achievements during the last decade: “the lives of Afghan men, women and children, have improved significantly (…)”.

Has NATO Met its Promises?

“They have not fulfilled their promises. The situation for women in Afghanistan is getting worse, every day”, claimed the 20-year-old Reena, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who told Zahra’s story. After hearing about Zahra’s case, RAWA admitted the girl into one of their safe houses. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan is an independent political and social organization of women fighting for human rights and social justice. They are being watched, and due to this, they have to operate semi-underground. Frequently, they receive threatening letters and phone calls, “but there is no other way if you want to bring a change”, said Reena. In every area, the situation of Afghan women would be dismal, including education, employment, and health, freedom from violence, political participation, and equality before the law. Forced marriage, and oppression of women belong to the bitter everyday life in Afghanistan. “Day by day, women are being raped, and since we have foreign forces in our country, even by them.”

Violence against Women Increased

A study by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) registered 1026 cases of violence against women in the second quarter of 2011. By contrast, in 2010 there were 2700 cases in total. A nationwide survey by Global Rights of 4700 Afghan women, found that 87.2% had experienced at least one form of physical, sexual, or psychological violence including forced marriage in their lifetimes. The forms of violence include physical violence, rape, and ‘honor killings’. However, the country’s 2004 constitution guaranteed a number of important rights for women, including the right to an education, the right to equality before the law, and the right to work. In 2009, the Elimination of Violence against Women law, which criminalized many harmful traditional practices, has been introduced by the Afghan government.

Claudia Söder, Afghanistan expert at the women’s rights organization Medica Mondiale blamed first of all the insecurity in the country for the increase of violence against women, “recently, we even have the feeling that the situation for women in Afghanistan deteriorated”. NATO’s military intervention cannot be considered as a success in terms of women’s rights, and NATO has chosen a wrong approach; they gave weapons to Afghans but a majority of the recruited men were not military trained and in most cases are completely illiterate. Moreover, NATO’s focus was on the military rather than on the civilian population. Another big issue is the high rate of corruption within the Afghan government and society, “just because a law is written on paper, it does not mean that it is implemented in society”, said Ms Söder.

“They show a wrong picture in the west. They show that the war they are fighting for is a good war. But that is not true.” – Reena, RAWA Member of the Foreign Committee

Education has been a top priority for both the Afghan government and the foreign forces while a majority of girls’ schools were closed down under the Taliban. According to the 2011 Education for all Global Monitoring Report, there are now 2.7 million girls enrolled in school, 38% of the 7.3 million total students. However, a visible change took place in major cities whereas the number of schools in rural areas, where 80-90% of Afghans live, is still very low and with very poor standards. Furthermore, the dropout rate because of underage marriage is very high and due to this, a majority of girls’ visits school for only a few years. 57% of all marriages that take place in Afghanistan are classified by UNIFEM as child marriages (under 16 years old) and 70-80% as forced marriages. Moreover, “how can girls and boys study when there is war and when the situation is so unsecure?” asked Reena.

Naida Nashir Karim, chairman of the Afghan Women’s Association Germany (Afghanischer Frauenverein e.V.) said it was particularly pleasing to see that a significantly higher number of political positions are held by women nowadays and that women appear to be becoming more self-confident during the last decade. Overall, she does not believe that the promises made by NATO were kept. “Military troops will never be able to make peace. They rather protect themselves.” Karim, who was born in Kunduz, also supports the opinion that western media show a wrong picture of the situation in Afghanistan. “If a woman is stoned by the Taliban, western newspapers will report about it. But no one cares when civilians are killed by the NATO”, claims Karim.

According to the Islamic scientist Abbas Poya at the University of Freiburg in Germany, there have been some visible changes concerning the question of women’s rights in Afghanistan. What is grotesque though, is that these women represent only an urban minority. Overall, the picture shows that in countries where “the West” is not military involved, human and women’s rights are a focus of the discourse. The discourse changes however, where western military is present. In that case, issues such as security, occupation policy, and foreign interests take a central place.

Has the Media Lost its Interest?

However, it seems that the future of Afghanistan’s women is not on the top media agenda these days and its focus rather on the withdrawal of NATO troops in 2014. In addition, France’s new president aims to redeem his election promises and has therefore put forward a pace that its NATO partners dizzy. And all over sudden, it is no longer spoken about the original objectives, to rid the country out of oppression and religious fanaticism.

The Shia Personal Status Law

In March 2009, the diminishing status of women’s rights came back into focus when the Shia Personal Status Law was signed by President Hamid Karzai and passed by the parliament and the highest Afghan religious leaders, in an apparent attempt to garner political support from powerful political factions. The new law regulates marriage, divorce, and inheritance for the country's Shia population (about 15-20% of the population). According to the law, women are subordinated to men they may even be beaten by them. It includes provisions that require a woman to ask permission to leave the house except on urgent business, a duty to ‘make herself up’ or ‘dress up’ for her husband when demanded, a duty not to refuse sex when her husband wants it, and a duty to have sex every four days, unless a woman has health problems. The marriage age for women is lowered from 18 to 16 years.

Even after ten years of commitment of the international community in Afghanistan, the Shia Personal Status Law -which seems rather in the past and not in the future-, could be adopted. Why? Looking at the whole country, basically, structures have not changed much within the last ten years, said Islamic scientist Abbas Poya. Especially in the width of the society, nothing has changed. Due to this, laws like the Shia Personal Status Law can still be adopted in Afghanistan. “The law is actually a bit symbolic”, said RAWA member Reena. There has been violence against women before and after the new law. However, fear and helplessness would have increased because what men do to women is legal now. “There is no hope for women.”

NATO’s Response

“Our objectives in 2001 were certainly too ambitious”, admits Dr. Philipp Wendel, NATO’s public relations officer. Meanwhile, they became more realistic. To strengthen the security situation in Afghanistan continuously is one of their major goals at the moment. “Within the past ten years, we were able to improve women’s access to education and to public services. For instance, there is actually a female general officer in the Afghan army which we do not even have in the German Armed Forces”, said Wendel.

Furthermore, the birth mortality rate would have declined significantly as well as the mortality rate of women who die during pregnancy or birth. However, the strengthening of women’s rights can only be realized in a long-run. “In terms of women’s rights, we expect regress after the withdrawal of a majority of NATO troops in 2014. Nonetheless, we are very satisfied about the development of the Afghan Army during the last decade and we will continue to support the Afghan forces.” A serious effort on the part of the Afghan government must be continuously exerted.

How will the Future Look Like?

Zahra has been living in a safe house for almost two years. She got to know a different life, where she now has opportunities she did not even imagine could exist, where nobody is stopping her and where she can study and live her life almost the way she wants to. Zahra does not want to lose this new life, but she also longs for her family and especially for her younger sisters. Sadly, Zahra won’t be able to see them soon because it is certain that her father and her brothers would kill her in case of a return.

Zahra’s fate is shared by many Afghan girls. What do they wish for their future? “We want peace, no war. We want democracy and social justice“, answered Reena. To improve the situation of Afghanistan’s women permanently, the society needs to accept women as a part of society. To make this happen, it needs a change in people’s ideology and in their way of thinking.

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When Business Overruled Human Rights

Text and Photography by Liselott Lindström
 

The exact amount is unknown. But thousands, if not millions of people are yearly forced to leave their homes to make way for multinational corporations who bought their land to grow crops for export.  Since the food crisis in 2008, the need for land has increased enormously. International law makes it easy to grab land in Africa – and very difficult for the evicted people to get justice. 

Two big yellow eyes look up at me when I enter the small mud hut. Malitini Sheni rises from his chair with great agony and limps over to the door to greet me. Two of his children are chasing each other in the yard; the third, youngest one is chasing a hen, imitating its clucking. The small ones seem to be unbothered by the situation, or maybe unknowing. Within a month, they will have to leave their home. Where to go, they have no idea.

Food Security – For Whom? 

Since 2000, more than 1200 agricultural land deals have reportedly been made in developing countries, covering nearly 84 million hectares of land. The area that has been worst affected is Africa. The reported land deals on the continent cover nearly 5 percent of the agricultural area, which roughly equals the size of Kenya. In reality, the number can be much higher, leaving us with the question: what happened to the people who lived on this land? 

The targeted countries are typically Sub-Saharan, poor, hungry, poorly integrated in the world economy, have weak land institutions and high levels of investor protection. Most of the investors come from China followed by Saudi-Arabia, with also the US, the UK and Sweden making it to the top ten.  

"There’s nothing bad per se in providing protection to investors, but the problem is that so much less progress has been made in developing protection for people who might be affected by the investment,” says Lorenzo Cotula, Senior Researcher in Law and Sustainable Development at the International Institute for Environment and Development.
 

Development versus Devastation 

To reach Malitini’s home we drove for two hours along something that can barely be called a road. His village Kikundi lies in the Uluguru Mountains, outside of the city of Morogoro in Southern Tanzania.  As far as the eye can see there are dry mountain landscapes with banana and papaya trees scattered here and there. For generations, Malitini’s family has been living in this area, growing food for their living. But about a year ago, their lives turned to hell. Lack of investment in agriculture has caused the average yield per hectare in Africa to be more than three times lower than in East Asia. Investors often claim that they are enhancing development by leasing land that isn’t utilized. 

The reports on land deals however tell a very different story, a story about a fight for land between African farmers and multinational investors. Nearly half of the reported land deals target cropland, and more than 60 percent target areas with high population densities, which means good accessibility to near cities and already existing infrastructure. Due to the enormous lack of transparency, it is uncertain how many people have been evicted due to land deals. When it comes to compensation, the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights affirms the human right to property. In principle this protects the farmer’s right to his land. “The problem is that the charter doesn’t require the government to pay any compensation if the land is taken. Development is very unlikely to happen in a situation where the law is so skewed,” Cotula says.
 
When compensation is paid, it often goes to local authorities, who put the money in their own pocket. “The whole development discourse around large land deals saying it will bring infrastructure, jobs and lead to food security is nothing but myths,” says Anuradha Mittal, founder and executive director for the Oakland Institute, an American think tank investigating land deals in Africa.
 

In the Footsteps of the East India Trading Company 

The ground to the problems for the villagers of Kikundi started already in the 1960’s when Tanzania became independent. The land where the village of Kikundi lies was given to an external cooperative under the condition that they should cultivate the land. None of this involved the today 1000 inhabitants of Kikundi, and they were able to continue their small scale agriculture as before. Recently it turned out the government had threatened to take the land back from the cooperative, since they had not fulfilled their promise of cultivation. In fear of losing their land, the cooperative sold it to a professor from Rwanda. He wanted the villagers out. 

The reason all this has been possible lies in the colonial heritage. Land in Africa is most often owned by the state or government, and the people living on the land are not the ones who own it. Anuradha Mittal says the engine driving this trend of land grabbing has been the World Bank, encouraging countries to loosen regulations to become attractive to investors.
“Look at the manifestos of the Tanzanian Investment Centre, Zambian Development Agency or the CPI in Mozambique [land investment agencies]. They are identical word by word, written by the World Bank.” 

What would be needed is investment in the smallholders. The same things being offered to foreign investors should also be offered to them: water, infrastructure, market, cheap land and tax benefits. “If you’re looking for 18-20 percent return, do it in your own country. Going into Africa and looking for such profit, that is old fashioned colonialism,” Mittal says. 

International Law Supports Companies 

“The professor came to my home one day, telling me I should go with him. I refused. Two days later, he came back with two men. They beat me up with wooden sticks,” Malitini says, and lifts his white t-shirt to reveal two big lumps on his back. He can no longer walk properly, which makes working difficult. After buying the land the professor put out guards in the village. People’s houses have been burned down and crops destroyed. 

There are currently nearly 3000 bilateral investment treaties in the world granting investors strong protection of their property rights. Arrangements for claiming and enforcing human rights treaties are nowhere nearly as effective.  

Whereas a company can go straight to international arbitraries and get a binding judgment in a dispute with a government, the road for an African villager is very different. Accessing international remedies can take years, because the farmer has to go through all the levels of the national courts first. 

“When you have done that you can go to the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, leading to a non-binding recommendation. The commission can then decide on taking the case to the African Court on Human and People’s Rights, at which point you can get a binding judgment,” says Cotula. In other words, those already enjoying access to capital and influence, also have stronger rights. “The situation is very dire,” Mittal says. “We need research and advocacy leading to naming and shaming people involved in this trend. Local and national capacity has to be strengthened.” 

Also the public awareness of the peasants has to become stronger; they need to know their rights and how they can take action. Mittal says many investors involve pension funds and private equity funds, as well as universities such as Harvard. One example where media attention led to the cancellation of a deal happened in February this year. The State University of Iowa withdrew from a deal that a company called AgriSol was planning in Tanzania. The deal would have lead to more than 160 000 people being evicted from their land. The company says it is only a question of moving a Burundian refugee camp. A camp that has been the home of these Burundians for more than forty years.
 

Toothless Regulations

Next to the door, a small children’s shoe hangs, moving slightly in the wind. It is to remind of Malitini’s and his wife’s fourth child, who died as an infant. His wife, a small, slender woman, sits in the corner, looking anxious. 

”When our land was seized, we went to the regional representative, and even to the district representative. But they had been bribed by the professor. Even our own chief had taken money from him”, Malitini says. The villagers have now taken the case to lawyers in Dar es Salaam, thanks to the help from Mviwata, a farmer’s organization uniting smallholders to have a common voice in the fight for their interests. They are now awaiting trial.
In many countries there are provisions requiring investors to consult local communities before getting a land lease, but they are hardly followed. 

“We both need to change the law and make existing law work better,” Lorenzo Cotula says.
In May 2012 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FAO published guidelines on governance of tenure to improve the situation. The guidelines are a result of three years of work, and they are – voluntary. “Nice effort, they have no teeth. Given what is at stake and the consequences it is ridiculous,” Mittal says. 

Tuomo Heinonen, Land Tenure Officer at the FAO, says a large group of representatives from different countries have been involved in creating them. “We are trying to make the guidelines largely known, from which we hope a collective supervision will follow and wrongdoings will more easily become known to the large public.” 

Land grabbing is almost directly correlating with land tenure and ownership. The stronger and more developed a country is in this sense, the less land grabbing occurs. Tuomo Heinonen has worked with land registration in Africa, Eastern Europe and Palestine, and believes registration of land is one way to make land grabbing harder. ”The rush for natural resources creates great temptation for the leaders in developing countries to sell state land and take the revenue.” 

A paper showing that you own the land can be a guarantee that gives you a bank loan, but when hunger or drought strikes, the temptation to sell the land without understanding the real value of it can become too big, Mittal explains.

Unprecedented Consequences

 “This model is so incredibly unsustainable that it won’t last,” Mittal says. “Are we going to do nothing and then pay the huge price humanity will have to pay: human rights violations, complete degradation of our environment, loss of virgin lands and forests.”
The list of consequences from Tuomo Heinonen is no bedtime story. “Increasing poverty, hunger, malnutrition, diseases, loss of biodiversity and natural resources, increasing amounts of refugees, crime and conflicts.” 

Moving large amounts of people might also escalate the urbanization process, making the slums in big cities ever bigger and poorer. Mittal is concerned, especially after ten people were killed in South Sudan in May due to land disputes. “I don’t think the world can afford conflict in Africa anymore. That continent has been ravaged way too far.” 

I walk from Malitini’s house towards the car. The villagers have assembled outside a worn down house, the centre of the village. In front of it a homemade flagpole with the yellow and green flag of the ruling party lazily moving in the mountain breeze. The children give me pieces of sugarcane “specially prepared for you madam”, and all the sweetness makes me sick. It is August 2010, and elections are coming up in Tanzania. There is still hope in the eyes of the villagers. Since the land in Tanzania is vested in the president, he could claim the land back on behalf of the villagers. Not a completely vain hope, the current president Jakaya Kikwete spares no efforts to keep the throne. However, it is very unlikely that another car than the professor’s will make it through the rough landscape up to Kikundi. I leave. Two years later I try to contact Mviwata to get to know what happened to the villagers. Ten e-mails - no answer.


Links to sources used for background information:

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-17099348
2. /http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/05/30/the-landgrabbers-who-owns-the-planet/
3. http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/9781905811731
4. http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4021-world-bank-report-on-land-grabbing-beyond-the-smoke-and-mirrors
5. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTARD/Resources/ESW_Sept7_final_final.pdf
6. http://formin.finland.fi/public/default.aspx?contentId=219703&nodeId=23&contentlan=1&culture=fi-FI
7. http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/OI_FAQsjune5.pdf
8. http://www.fian-nederland.nl/home/208-land-grabbing-breaches-international-human-rights-law.html
9. http://fian.org/news/press-releases/fao-tenure-guidelines-a-modest-step-governments-must-commit-to-implementation
10. http://www.evidensresearch.dk/media/1242/land%20grab.pdf

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The story of the Erased - people who die twice

European Union and Human Rights

by Karmen Resman, written in May 2012

It was the summer of 1991. Katarina Stojanović was 20 years old and was just finishing the first year of her bachelor studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She was taking driver’s lessons for a few weeks already and her 10‐year‐old brother couldn’t wait for his sister to finally get a license and take him to the seaside. Katarina was madly in love with her boyfriend and they just started planning a trip with their friends. It was going to be a wonderful summer. But then her country became independent and everything changed. In a few months Katarina lost her home, family and friends. And her identity. She was erased.

Photo by www.siol.net

What happened in Slovenia 20 years ago is still a painful evidence of how a young government violated human rights. 25 670 people in the new country shared Katarina’s destiny. They were unlawfully deprived of their legal status after Slovenia declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).

While Slovenian citizens became citizens of the new country automatically, those, who were citizens of the former SFRY or another Yugoslavian republic and had permanent addresses in Slovenia had to apply for it. 

There was around 130 000 people like that – mainly from Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and also Slovenia. The majority got the citizenship, but almost 26 000 of them did not. They either failed to apply, or their application was refused or discarded. In some cases the procedure was even terminated.

On February 26th 1992 those people lost their permanent residence status in Slovenia and by that all the economic and social rights tied to it. They lost their jobs, medical benefits, pensions. They did not exist “on paper” anymore. What happened that winter was “administrative ethnic cleansing”, it was “civil death”.
 

Katarina’s story

Katarina’s parents were Serbs, so when the war started and the tensions between nationalities rose, they decided to go back to Serbia. Katarina, who was born in Slovenia, insisted she wanted to stay in the country she was brought up in and start a life there.
“It was Friday,” she remembers, “when I went from Ljubljana, where I studied, to my home town Maribor for the weekend. I tried to unlock the door to our apartment, the same apartment I was raised in, and the key did not fit. I tried again and again, until a tall man opened the door and started yelling at me. He told me I was the enemy’s daughter and that I should be deported. As he threatened to call the police, I ran out of the building, in utmost and complete shock.”

Katarina had nowhere to go. All she had left was a little suitcase full of clothes and a note stand. After a few days of panic and thinking about what she should do, she decided to fight for her home. She first wanted to renew her identity card, but what followed then was beyond her understanding. The municipality official in Maribor simply took her identity card and cut it in half, saying “you are not from here, go back to Serbia!” As the lady threatened to call the police, Katarina, once again, ran away.

For the next six years this was her life - running away from everything. She was secretly living in a basement of a student dorm. Every day she had to take a shower in another floor, so people would not notice she lives there. For a few years she almost did not have any warm food. To earn at least some money she was working illegally. She had false ID’s and false student cards; when she had to go to the doctor, she used another name. She travelled with a false passport, and when they did not let her cross the Slovenian border with Croatia once, she crossed it illegally.

For years Katarina knew she was a criminal just by existing in Slovenia. Whenever she saw a policeman on the street, she turned around and went another way. A day did not go by without her looking over her shoulder.

Everybody knew about the “murders on paper”, even Europe. But it did nothing to bring 25 671 people back to life.
Slovenian Constitutional Court declared the act of erasing as illegal and unconstitutional and demanded from a country to provide redress for these violations. Twice. But Slovenia did not fully fulfill the demands; some of the people are still erased today. European Union had the chance to demand from the social state that was preparing to join the family of European Union states in 2004, to truly exercise the third article of its constitution and guarantee the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms to all persons irrespective of their national origin. But it did not. Why was the European Union looking away then and why is it looking away now?

The timing was right, but...

From the day Slovenia applied for the membership in the EU in 1996 and until it actually joined 8 years later, the issue of the Erased has been debated upon largely in the national politics and media. This is why it is even more surprising that in years of negotiations the Erased were never properly addressed by the European institutions. Was it that the Union did not want to raise the question of neglecting human rights because its motive was to get Slovenia to join as soon as possible and without any major problems?

Slovenia was always the most liberal of the republics in former Yugoslavia. After it established a stable democracy and moved easily to a market economy, it became clear to Brussels that this young country could quickly integrate into the European family. That would be Union’s first step towards the Balkan countries – then already it was clear that the EU’s goals for the future are to expand to the east.

In the late 90’ the Commission no longer needed to be wooed. With Slovenia’s GDP higher than Greece’s and close to Portugal’s and the unemployment rate lower than in Germany or France, the Commission was hooked. The negotiation period went by smoothly, Slovenia requested and was granted a very limited number of transitional periods, which, according to the Commission, only proved how well prepared for implementing the acquis the country was.

However, the Commission at that time already knew about the issue of the Erased. In a report about Slovenia in 1997, before the negotiations officially started, it first stated “no cases of inhuman and degrading treatment have been reported”. Then it mentioned the Erased, claiming there is “a group of around 5000 people who for various reasons have neither asked for Slovenian nationality nor claimed refugee status after the erasure”. The Commission proposed no remedy then, except of that about the government “taking the appropriate steps to resolve this problem”. However, no obligations for Slovenia because the Commission claimed it had “no jurisdiction” over the matter.
 

No jurisdiction – no problem!

The negotiations started a year later without even mentioning the human rights matters in Slovenia, not even in the chapter about home affairs. “The reason for that lies in the fact that the European Union was founded for economic reasons and economic reasons only, without any regard to the human rights,” says Neža Kogovšek Šalamon, a researcher at the Peace Institute in Ljubljana. Only later the Union developed other aspects of governing, among which there was the promotion of human rights, too.

Another reason for the Erased not being mentioned in the negotiations talks is that the negotiations were not individual; there were six countries in the so‐called Luxembourg group that were aiming to join EU at the same time. Since all of them had quite similar predispositions, the negotiations were executed in a group. “It was negotiation for “a package of countries”, we could say. The same frameworks were prepared for all of the six countries, which is why Slovenia’s “personal” issues were not as precisely debated,” Boštjan Udovič, a professor of EU Enlargement at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana is convinced.

Photo by www.siol.net

There is no doubt about the fact weather it was a political decision to include Slovenia in the Luxembourg “package”, according to Udovič. European enlargement is a matter of great political manipulations and not all countries in the accession process are treated the same. European Union had much greater demands from Croatia, for example. “After the incidents at the gay pride parade in Split last year, they sent a clear message to them how that cannot be a part of Europe,” says Udovič.
 

The first and last step towards the solution

It’s been 20 years from the erasure and some of the Erased, they estimate there is a few thousand of them today, still do not have their citizenship or residency. Slovenia has in the meantime enforced two laws and countless acts in order to solve the issue, which has been spiced up with a number of national disputes over it. That is also why most of the laws and acts are inadequate and require further thought and the adoption of additional measures. The first law (Act on Regularizing the Status of Citizens of Other State Successors of the Former SFRY in the Republic of Slovenia), which came in force after the Constitutional Court declared the erasure as illegal and unconstitutional in 1999, at least partially solved the issue. Some 12,000 people took advantage of the new law; 7,000 received citizenship, and 4,800 obtained permanent or temporary residency.

The Act was, even though not adequate for all of the Erased, an important milestone, giving back the status to some of them. Some credit for that goes to the European Commission, which in 1997 advised the government to take appropriate measures, says Neža Kogovšek Šalamon: “The combination of both international and national pressures on the government processed this act in 1999. As it showed later, in 2003, when the Constitutional Court for the second time declared the erasure illegal and unconstitutional, only the national pressure was not enough: the government did not act as the court ordered it. Why? Maybe because the pressure from the European Commission was gone by then. Slovenia already closed all the chapters of negotiations and was only waiting for the formal accession. The Slovenian government itself just did not have the interest to solve the matter.”

Katarina Stojanović got her citizenship back in 1999 with the “naturalization law”. She was erased for 7 years. Today she is Katarina Keček, a married woman and a mother of two. And a successful journalist. She’s working at a private TV station in Ljubljana, preparing short documentaries about people’s lives and struggles they have to go through. For years she has been reporting about the Erased, telling sad stories of how they were left without their jobs, homes, insurance, loved ones, but kept quiet about her own. Only this year, 20 winters after the one that turned her life upside down, Katarina decided to reveal hers.
International institutions still looking away

The lives of the Erased have been out there for a long time already. They appealed to the European Court of Human Rights and to many other international bodies for human rights in the last twenty years. Some of them decided to step up and help, most of them did not.

The European Union had the power to force the Slovenian government to stop ignoring the issue and to find a solution during the negotiation period for Slovenia’s accession to the EU. The effects of Commission’s opinion, which resulted in a naturalization law, proved that Slovenia cared about what Europe thought and it would easily enforce demands in-lined with the European aspect of human rights. Sadly, the Union was focusing too much on economic gain only.

Finding a remedy for the Erased would also be an important precedent for other countries that have pursued policies of mass denationalization: Cambodia with ethnic Vietnamese, Myanmar with Rohingya Arakanese, Syria with Kurds, Ethiopia with persons with Eritrean affiliation, Bhutan with ethnic Nepalese, Vietnam with ethnic Chinese 'boat people' and France with ethnic Germans.

But now it is too late. The Erased have become a Slovenian “internal issue”. It is also clear that the European Union is only a collection of national states that follow the logic of “mind your own business”. Which is why Slovenia and its politicians who would need a kick from the outside, cannot bring the Erased back to life for twenty years already.
“One of the most difficult things for me after I got my citizenship back, was to realize I don’t have to hide anymore,” says Katarina. “The need of looking over my shoulder... It will probably never go away.”

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A new Human Right

By Belinda Grasnick

Water is a crucial resource for human life. As drinking water, it provides the essential foundation for life, and used for sanitation, it can prevent diseases and supports development. Because of its important functions for humanity, the need for an international recognition of a right to water is being emphasized by different  actors at the global and the local level. Nonetheless, the global community still has to find a solution how to guarantee the access to water for everyone.

Photography by Samir Marun

At the press conference of the sixth World Water Forum in Marseille this year, member of the French Académie de l'Eau and of the European Environment Council Henri Smets expressed his optimism concerning the implementation of a right to water. “It is the only new human right in fifty years”, he explained. “It is extraordinary. We needed an enthusiastic movement in all countries, and now the enthusiasm has been strong enough in order to recognize the right to water unanimously in the Human Rights Committee.”

Since 1997, the World Water Forum assembles politicians and experts in the field every three years and thus puts water governance as an issue on the global agenda. In March 2012, the World Water Council held the conference in Marseille. The President of the World Water Council Loïc Fauchon sheds more light on the choice of the underlying theme of this year's conference, “Time for solutions”, by highlighting the necessity to include all kinds of different stakeholders. “Year after year, the response to water and sanitation issues has become increasingly of a political order”, he says. “But we need to go further since, beyond words and declarations, what our planet needs is concrete and credible actions.”

The Need for Water

Being able to access water is an important factor for the comfort of every individual. According to the World Water Assessment Programme, each person needs twenty to fifty litres of water a day to ensure their basic needs. Water is not merely essential to life, but it also makes human existence liveable by enhancing personal well-being as well as familial and social relations. “Lack of water supply and sanitation produces infectious diseases and reduces life expectancy in the majority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa today”, says Benedito Braga, Vice-President of the World Water Council. Thus, a fair water distribution has to be an integral part of the development process in all countries.

Besides its importance in private households, water is crucial to agriculture and industry. Different economic sectors compete for our finite freshwater resources, because they are essential to food production, energy markets and health care. For this reason, it is important to find a way how to treat the remaining resources sustainably and to give households priority in the network of water distribution at the same time.

However, the fact that water resources are not equally distributed in the world makes assuring a universal access to water an even more difficult task. While certain regions, like Europe, have regular rainfall, other parts of the world are struggling with more irregular precipitation, causing both droughts and flooding. “This situation will become more complex if one considers that critical hydrological events will tend to be even more intense under the threat of climate change”, underlines Benedito Braga. In other words, the unequal distribution of water will be exacerbated by even less predictable natural phenomena. In combination with a lack of efficient distribution and storage systems, this irregularity poses a problem to providing especially the poorest regions of the world with safe water sources.

In order to find a global solution for water access, the need for a more equal water distribution has been addressed by global governance bodies in the last decades. Target 7.C of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) seeks to halve the proportion of the international population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. In this context, distribution systems are to be built and improved. The Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, put in place by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, controls the realization of this target. According to their report, the MDG has been met early with regards to drinking water, as 83 per cent of the global population had access to improved drinking water sources already in 2002; in 2012, the number mounted to 89 per cent. At the same time, the MDG target for the access to sanitation is still far from met.

Implementing the Right to Water

The inclusion of an increased access to in the MDGs has not been the only step undertaken by international bodies in order to assure an equal distribution of water. Certain rights included in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), such as the right to life, and the rights to health, food, housing and an adequate standard of living, imply the need for water. In order to assure these rights, a safe access to water is required. Being part of the International Bill of Human Rights, the ICESCR is a multilateral bill that has been adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 16, 1966. It is a binding agreement: all states that have ratified the bill are bound to apply it.

Nonetheless, the idea of a separate, explicit right to water has been pushed forward and was finally included in the General Comment Number 15 (GC15) to the ICESCR in 2002. The GC15 reads that “the human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses. An adequate amount of safe water is necessary to prevent death from dehydration, reduce the risk of water-related disease and provide for consumption, cooking, personal and domestic hygienic requirements.”

The GC15 is intended to elaborate on the articles of the covenant. “However, this addition to the ICESCR is not agreed to by all the states that are bound by the covenant itself”, emphasizes Andrew Allan, lecturer in National Water Law at the University of Dundee and expert in International Water Law. In this way, the addition to the covenant putting forward the idea of a human right to water is not binding for all United Nation members. Nonetheless, some countries have introduced the right to water in their national constitutions until today – among them Ecuador, Ethiopia, France and South Africa.

A Cape of Good Hope

Photography by Samir Marun

Having included a universal right to water in their new constitution of 1996, the Republic of South Africa gave momentum to the debate about a human right to water. “Everyone has a right to have access to sufficient food and water”, is the exact wording of section 27 of the South African Bill of Rights.

Following the inclusion of the right to water in the Bill of Rights, South Africa had to create a fitting legal framework to accomplish a universal access to water. The White Paper on Water Supply and Sanitation from 1994 called for the supply of the country's poor with free safe water and for a maximum distance of 200 metres from any household to a water source by 2008. The basic level of service was set to 25 litres per person per day by the South African government. The policy for the provision of free basic water thus stipulated that every poor household would receive 6,000 litres of water every month free of charge.

In 1998, the National Water Act was adopted in order to reform laws relating to water sources. The Act sought to ensure the development, conservation, management and control of national water resources. Equitable access to water was to be promoted and racial and gender discrimination abolished. An efficient, sustainable and beneficial use of water in the public interest was targeted, so that social and economic development could be promoted, and aquatic and associated ecosystems and their biological diversity were protected.

The ambitious targets laid down in the different legal acts rise to the suspicion that they could not be met easily. Perhaps not surprisingly, the implementation of the right to water led to an important trial that made its way up to the Constitutional Court of South Africa. In 2009, the Mazibuko case questioned the realization of the right to water in the urban area of Soweto in Johannesburg. The governmental project included the improvement of water pipelines in the area and the installation of pre-paid meters to charge households as soon as they exceeded the monthly limit of 6,000 litres. Especially the use of such meters was considered highly discriminatory, because households were obliged to get their water on credit, and especially because the 6,000 litre limit per household did not take large families with many children into account.

After the objection was sustained by both the South Gauteng High Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal, the accusation was taken to the Constitutional Court. Finally, the Constitutional Court concluded that the progressive realization of the Free Basic Water is a reasonable policy in order to achieve a universal access to water. Furthermore, the final judgement announced that it is within the sovereignty of the government to define the basic water supply. Hence, the 25 litres determined by the South African government were accepted as the right measure for sufficient water supply.

Achieving the Goal

The South African case illustrates the difficulties in fairly distributing the given water resources and thus in translating the legal project of guaranteeing a right to water into practice. Implementing a human right to water is an ambitious project, but as long as it is not followed by concrete, effective actions, it will not result in providing the world's population with sufficient water. Some experts suggest that the right to water is in fact not the right approach to assuring access to water for everyone. “The basic question is how to get fresh water to everyone. One suggested solution is the human right to water. Is this the right answer? Many think so, but I am less sure”, says Andrew Allan.

Alain Mathys, Program Manager for development and institutional relations at the French utility company Suez Environment, is even clearer in his evaluation of the international approach to a right to water: “All these forums on the right to access to water are gathering the same kind of people repeating the same messages for years. They work mainly for themselves.” The experts are pointing out that political orders as the only measures will not contribute to an improvement of the world's water distribution.

The credibility of a human right to water is also reduced by the implementation of such a right in some countries. “In my view, the presence of a right to water in a constitution is often inversely proportional to that country's ability to implement it”, states Andrew Allan. That is to say, even if Ethiopia passes a law about the right to water, this does not mean that the access to water can actually be guaranteed to the population.

In the end, it is true that everyone in the world should have access to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses. This target, however, might not be achieved by merely introducing a legal project. It requires actions from stakeholders that represent governments, the private sector and civil society. Different regions need different approaches, and the global community should turn their attention to fitting strategies for each region. Most importantly, the focus of providing access to water, no matter how it is achieved, should be on clean and safe water sources. Building improved distribution networks, as it is currently targeted by the Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, does not signify that these sources are sufficient to provide healthy drinking water and sanitation. The main goal of a universal access to water should, however, be to secure health and comfort, and in this way to foster development.

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