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Key victories in 2007
- In April, LAW-Uganda convinced the Ugandan Constitutional Court to overturn unequal inheritance laws that limited widow’s rights to property and guardianship of their children. These laws, the Court agreed, treated women as second class citizens, in violation of equal treatment guarantees in Uganda’s Constitution.
- In Sierra Leone, Fund grantees LAWYERS and FAWE successfully pressed the country’s parliament to pass a new law in June that provides equal protection and rights to women in marriage, criminalizes forced and early marriage, and grants women the right to inherit property.
- In Baja California, Mexico, Centro Mujeres pressed state officials to adopt new protections against discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, ethnicity, age, and disability. The law, which went into effect in July, is the first of its kind in the country and can serve as a model for human rights organizations challenging discrimination in other Mexican states.
- In Tlaxcala, Mexico, Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Julián Garcés coordinated a successful campaign to challenge trafficking in women and children from rural areas to Mexico City to be sex workers, drug smugglers and laborers. This prompted voters in September 2007 to approve reforms to the state penal code that criminalize trafficking. The project now will press for implementation of the new law by urging the state to train law enforcement to detect and prosecute traffickers.
- In Chihuahua, Mexico, the Center for Women’s Rights won two precedent-setting legal victories. In August 2007, Center lawyers convinced a judge to approve the request of a twelve-year-old rape victim and her family to terminate the pregnancy that resulted from the assault—the first time a Chihuahua court has approved an abortion in the case of rape. Also in August, Center lawyers successfully used Mexico's new General Law on Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence and CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) to win a second violence suit. This is the first time in Mexico that these instruments have been used successfully in the prosecution of violence against women.
- In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, two of the Fund’s grantees succeeded in overturning rulings by traditional courts that were inconsistent with national laws. In October 2007, Arche de Alliance won an appellate decision stating that it is illegal to force a widow to marry her husband’s brother to keep her land and property. Grantee Haki Za Binadamu Maniema won an appeal of a similar case in which a widow was being forced to return her dowry to her in-laws unless she married her deceased husband’s brother.
- In January 2007, after a campaign by the Association Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc (ADFM), the legislature passed a bill giving women the right to pass on their Moroccan nationality to their children, even if the father is not Moroccan. As a result, thousands of children will be able to acquire Moroccan citizenship and thus have access to public schools. In 2008, ADFM will focus on the implementation of this new law through public awareness campaigns.
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