Day: October 1, 2020

Leaders and activists warned Thursday of a global pushback against women’s rights, 25 years after a landmark conference in Beijing that set out an ambitious agenda for women’s equality.“We need to start now, with your excellencies’ commitments at this commemoration, to recapture and ‘fast forward’ from the modest gains made since 1995 that are now under threat,” Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of U.N. Women, told leaders joining the virtual conference. “We need big bold steps, not incremental ones.”She said that while the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action had led to major advances — including 274 legal and regulatory reforms in 131 countries — significant gaps remained, including in achieving gender parity in representation from the boardroom to the peace table, as well as in wages.“It’s time to bring an end to discriminatory laws, norms and homophobia, to end men’s violence against women and girls, and make a concerted effort to put women at the heart of climate justice,” she added.Twenty-five years after the Beijing conference, advocates noted that no country has achieved full gender equality.In 1995, when the declaration was signed in Beijing, there were 12 female heads of state of government. Today, there are only 22 among 193 countries.German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrives for a press conference at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Aug. 19, 2020.“These days, the very states that are successful, economically and socially, as well as in terms of peaceful conflict resolution, are often those where women are among those shouldering responsibility,” said one of those leaders, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.President Emmanuel Macron of France lamented that in the current global climate, the 1995 Beijing Declaration would not find the consensus to be adopted in 2020.“That is where we are collectively,” he said. “Everywhere, women’s rights are under attack, as are human rights, from which they are inseparable. Progress achieved by great efforts is being undermined even in our democracies, starting with the freedom for women to control their own bodies, and in particular, the right to abortion.”French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during the closing press conference at the G5 Sahel summit on June 30, 2020, in Nouakchott.Data from the U.N. Population Fund show that only 55% of women worldwide are able to make their own decisions about their sexual and reproductive health and contraception.Women and girls also face inequalities in access to education. Twelve million girls under age 18 see their education end each year with forced marriage. Others are subjected to the harmful practice of female genital mutilation. One in three women will experience some form of violence in her lifetime.Women also have been particularly affected by the coronavirus pandemic.Ethiopia’s first female President Sahle-Work Zewde delivers a speech at the Parliament in Addis Ababa, Oct. 25, 2018.“While women are in the front lines fighting against this pandemic, they are also being pushed to the edges because of its multifaceted impacts,” said Ethiopian President Sahle-Work Zewde. “In much of the developing world, we know women depend on the informal economy to earn their living, and they find themselves in extremely difficult condition to sustain the lives and well-being of their families.”The pandemic has also made women and girls more vulnerable to domestic violence. U.N. Women says only 48 countries treat violence against women and girls-related services as integral parts of their national and local COVID-19 response plans, with very few adequately funding these measures.United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during an interview with Reuters at U.N. headquarters in New York City, Sept. 14, 2020.“Unless we act now, COVID-19 could wipe out a generation of fragile progress toward gender equality,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned. “COVID-19 is a catastrophe, but it is also an opportunity for transformative thinking that puts women front and center of the response and the recovery.”Participants called for a recommitment to the Beijing Declaration’s principles, and the necessary policy changes, partnerships and investments to realize the goals.
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Chrissy Teigen said she and John Legend are in “deep pain” following her miscarriage, which she announced in a heart wrenching social media post.
Teigen wrote that they were “driving home from the hospital with no baby. This is unreal.”
“We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before. We were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed, despite bags and bags of blood transfusions. It just wasn’t enough,” she wrote in a post late Wednesday, alongside a picture of herself in tears on a hospital bed. Another image showed her and Legend grieving together over a bundle cradled in her arms.
Revealing they had chosen the name Jack, the model and the musician wrote of their love for their lost son, who would have been their third child.
“To our Jack – I’m so sorry that the first few moments of your life were met with so many complications, that we couldn’t give you the home you needed to survive. We will always love you,” she wrote.
Legend retweeted her post, adding “We love you, Jack.”
Teigen announced she was pregnant with her third child in August. She had been been hospitalized with excessive bleeding earlier in the week.
Thanking those who have been sending “positive energy, thoughts and prayers,” Teigen concluded, “We are so grateful for the life we have, for our wonderful babies Luna and Miles, for all the amazing things we’ve been able to experience. But everyday can’t be full of sunshine. On this darkest of days, we will grieve, we will cry our eyes out. But we will hug and love each other harder and get through it.”
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Is dislodging African artwork from a European museum a political statement, or a criminal act? That’s the question a French court weighed Wednesday in an emotionally charged trial centered around a Congolese activist campaigning to take back art he says was plundered by colonizers.
“It belongs to us!” shouted a Black woman watching the trial, breaking down in tears and storming out after a lawyer for Paris’ Quai Branly Museum insisted that its holdings — including tens of thousands of artworks from former colonies — belong to the French state.
Congo-born Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza and four other activists went on trial on attempted theft charges for removing a 19th century African funeral pole from its perch in the museum in a June protest livestreamed on Facebook. Guards quickly stopped them; the activists argue that they never planned to steal the work but just wanted to call attention to its origins.
Lurking beneath nearly every exchange in the courtroom was the question of whether and how former empires should atone for colonial-era wrongs. The question took on new urgency after this year’s global protests against racial injustice unleashed by George Floyd’s death in the U.S. at the knee of a white policeman.
Diyabanza seized on that mood and has staged three livestreamed museum protests  in recent months — in Paris, Marseille and the Netherlands.
French officials denounced the Quai Branly incident, saying it threatens ongoing negotiations with African countries launched by President Emmanuel Macron in 2018 for legal, organized restitution efforts.
If convicted of attempted group theft of a historical object, Diyabanza could face up to 10 years in prison and a 150,000 euro fine ($173,000). However, the lawyer for the French state did not ask for prison time, demanding only modest fines. A verdict is scheduled Oct. 14.
Diyabanza defended what he called a “political act” and said it’s about time that Africans, Latin Americans and other colonized communities take back ill-gotten treasures. He accuses European museums of making millions on artworks taken from now-impoverished countries like Congo, and said the pole, which came from current-day Chad, should be among works returned to Africa.
“We are the legitimate heirs of these works,” he said. But he insisted that “appropriation wasn’t my goal. … The aim was to mark the symbolism of the liberation of these works.”
The presiding judge asked the activists why they thought they had the right to take the law into their own hands. He insisted that the trial should focus on the specific funeral pole incident and that his court wasn’t competent to judge France’s colonial era as a whole.
Quai Branly lawyer Yvon Goutal argued that because of the discussions underway between France and African governments, “there is no need for this political act.” The French state “is very committed to this, and serious” about following through, he said. The prosecutor said the activists should have made their point via more peaceful means.
Defense lawyer Hakim Chergui argued that it shouldn’t have taken this many decades after African countries’ independence to settle the issue. He choked up when talking about the skulls of Algerian 19th century resistance fighters long held as trophies in a French museum and returned to his native Algeria this year.
“There is a frustration in the population that is growing, growing, growing,” he said, calling Wednesday’s proceedings “a trial of the colonial continuum.”
Applause and boos periodically interrupted the proceedings. A crowd of supporters shouted in anger at not being able to enter the small, socially distanced courtroom, and judges sent Diyabanza to calm them down.
The Quai Branly Museum, on the banks of the Seine River near the Eiffel Tower, was built under former French President Jacques Chirac to showcase non-European art, notably from ex-French colonies.
A 2018 study commissioned by Macron recommended that French museums give back works that were taken without consent, if African countries request them. So far, France is preparing to give back 26 works of African art — out of some 90,000 works believed held in French museums, most in the Quai Branly.
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