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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

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Welcome to AdvocacyNet, November 2001

Welcome to the first issue of AdvocacyNet, the monthly email newsletter about The Advocacy Project and its partners.
 
The Advocacy Project (AP) was launched in the summer of 1998 to support community-based campaigns that are working for human rights and peace. We began by sending out reports from international conferences through our online newsletter 'On the Record'. We then used 'On the Record' to profile actual campaigns. More recently, we have started to develop a broader package of communications support for partners that can include the design of websites and technical training.
 
AP maintains a database of several thousand contacts who subscribe to one or more of our publications, and they will receive AdvocacyNet free of charge each month. We welcome letters, comments, and tips about new publications. We also invite inquiries about new partnerships. Feel free to send us an email.
 
AP is based in Washington DC, and is currently being restructured. Details will shortly be posted on the AP website, which is being redesigned.
 
To subscribe, send a blank email to this address and follow the instructions. For more information send us an email.

 
News From AP Partners:

• Women of Kosovo to Lobby Online for Effective Participation by Women in the November 17 Elections
• AP Advises Roma Women in Romania
• Child Advocates Reel From American Assault on Child Rights
• Center for Psychotrauma in Vukovar to Help Landmine Survivors
• Advocacy Package Could Accelerate the Pace of Bosnian Minority Refugee Returns
• Palestinian Civil Society Struggles Against Impossible Odds
• Network Against Trafficking Unites Civil Society in Nigeria and Italy
• Commentary: US Lawmakers Seek to Kill an International Criminal Court
• Letters
  • Kosova Women's Network
  • Child rights
  • Criminal court
  
  

News From AP Partners:
 
Women of Kosovo to Lobby Online for Effective Participation by Women in the November 17 Elections
 
A powerful network of 32 women's organizations in Kosovo, the Kosova Women's Network (KWN), has launched a new communications strategy with the help of The Advocacy Project. One of the network's first goals will be to campaign for an effective participation by women in the forthcoming November 17 elections.
 
The elections are one of several campaigns being conducted by the members of the KWN, which unites almost all of the Albanian women's movement in the province. KWN's monthly meetings in Prishtina are also attended by representatives from Kosovo's minorities - Ashkali, Egyptians, Roma and Serbs.
 
The KWN communications strategy will be built around a monthly newsletter, KWN Voices, which will be published each month in Albanian and English and posted on a new website which will shortly be open for visits.
 
The Advocacy Project is working with KWN to produce the newsletter and website, and also provide members with the technical capacity to communicate via the Internet. The project is supported by The Open Society Institute-Budapest. The website is being developed with help from the Internet Project Kosovo, which will also provide dial-up accounts for KWN members.
 
The KWN network owes much of its current momentum to the coordination of Motrat Qiriazi, a leading women's group that played a prominent role in supporting Kosovar women during the years of Serbian repression and the NATO-led bombing campaign. Since the war, Motrat Qiriazi has been critical of Western relief agencies, and the UN Mission in Kosovo, for stifling the energy and imagination of Kosovar civil society.
 
The forthcoming elections are seen as critical for the emancipation of Kosovo's women. The UN has required that a quarter of all candidates are women, but some KWN members are concerned that this could be unrealistic, given the generally low levels of education and confidence of Kosovo's women. As a result, KWN has launched a campaign to educate women politicians. It is also taking politicians into communities to show them first-hand the challenges facing women.
 
Among its other campaigns, KWN has also set its sights on ending the trafficking of Kosovar women, curbing violence against women, and improving the literacy of women.

• To receive the KWN's new email newsletter, and learn more about the KWN's campaigns, please send an email to this address with only the word 'subscribe' in the body of the message. Or visit this website.
• For an illustrated profile of Motrat Qiriazi, and its struggles with the UN Mission in Kosovo, visit Motrat Qiriazi's website.

AP Advises Roma Women in Romania
 
AP's Technical Director, Teresa Crawford, visited the Roma Women's Association of Romania (RWAR) in September, to advise on the development of a proposal for a website for the Association, as well as a larger network of Roma women's organizations.
 
This followed a meeting of Roma women activists in Macedonia in 2000 that was funded by the Network Women's Program of the Open Society Institute. Participants agreed that sharing information within the network was essential for their development. The RWAR hopes to launch their website soon.
 
Child Advocates Reel From American Assault on Child Rights
 
Advocates for child rights are increasingly worried that a Special Session of the General Assembly on children next May will set the clock back on a decade of progress on child rights.
 
The Special Session was rescheduled following the September 11 terrorist attack on New York, and will now take place between May 8 and May 10, 2002. It will have a decisive impact on international programs for children for years to come, and this makes it of great interest to anyone campaigning on behalf of children.
 
The General Assembly has held three preparatory committee meetings to draft a core mission statement for the Special Session, entitled 'A World Fit for Children.' Nongovernmental organizations want this document to strengthen the Convention on the Rights of the Child (which has been ratified by every government except for the US and Somalia). They also feel that the types of challenges that face children today - war, AIDS, poverty, and even justice systems - require more participation from children themselves.
 
Both demands have met with fierce opposition from the Bush Administration. Indeed, child rights advocates are alarmed at the extent to which the US has managed to impose its views on the document, and they fear this might extend to the Special Session. The United States has also attacked the notion of 'reproductive rights,' which gained currency in the 1990s at a series of major UN meetings and could provide added legal protection for girls against sexual violence and the spread of AIDS.
 
On a more positive note, US diplomats worked intensively behind the scenes with Palestinian delegates to resolve a serious disagreement between Israel and the Palestinians over the impact of terrorism and occupation. This was one of the few successes of the last round of negotiations. Ironically, it happened just days before the terrorist attack on New York.
 
These negotiations have been covered in 'On the Record for Children', a newsletter that is produced by The Advocacy Project for the NGO Committee for UNICEF. The Committee comprises well over 100 NGOs that work closely with UNICEF. It is currently being restructured and decentralized to make it more responsive to the needs of its southern members.
 
'On the Record for Children' was produced for the two preparatory committee meetings this year, in hard copy and email. They can be read in pdf format on the NGO Committee website, which has been designed and maintained by AP.
 
The latest issue of the newsletter (Vol. 3 Issue 4) will present some perspectives on the Global Movement for Children, launched earlier this year by UNICEF and five large NGOs. Since April, no fewer than 38 million individuals have pledged to support the Global Movement.

• To subscribe to 'On the Record for Children' send a blank email to this address.

 
Center for Psychotrauma in Vukovar to Help Landmine Survivors
 
AP's newest partner, the Coalition for Work With Psychotrauma and Peace (CWWPP), based in the Croatian city of Vukovar, will shortly start working with landmine survivors who remain deeply traumatized by the wounds they suffered almost a decade ago.
 
Vukovar was the target for a sustained offensive by the Serbian army in the summer of 1991. Much of the city is still in ruins and many of its inhabitants, both Serb and Croat, are still traumatized. The CWWPP director, Dr. Charles Tauber, estimates that as many as 15 percent of the population in the region spent time in a prison, concentration camps or prisoner of war camps. The psychological damage is even greater among the refugee population.
 
An estimated 1,800 Croatians were wounded by mines, and according to experts their psychological distress is growing. This could lend itself to the approach of the CWWPP, which helps psychosocial victims reintegrate into society. CWWPP also recognizes that an important part of the work will involve strengthening the capacity of local support groups, including the Croatian Landmine Victim Association.
 
AP Associate Peter Lippman spent several weeks in Croatia in August and helped Dr. Tauber and his staff to develop materials for a new website. The site was designed by AP.

• Visit CWWPP's website to learn more.

 
Advocacy Package Could Accelerate the Pace of Bosnian Minority Refugee Returns
 
During his visit to the Former Yugoslavia this summer, AP Associate Peter Lippman met with officials from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to discuss the possibility of helping refugee organizations to better use communications in their campaigns to return home.
 
UNHCR's office in Bosnia supports a network of over 50 Legal Aid centers (including mobile offices). These could play a crucial role in promoting the return of Bosnian refugees to areas where they are in the minority, but their lobbying could have even more impact if they had a more cohesive and unifying system of communications.
 
Minority returns are picking up in Bosnia. Fifty thousand refugees returned home in the first eight months of this year, compared to 30,000 in the same period last year. But the returnees still face unemployment, discrimination, and hostility from nationalist politicians and unrepentant war criminals.
 
Many of these obstacles were examined by Lippman in his 1999/2000 series of 'On the Record' on Bosnian refugees. Lippman profiled refugee initiatives and individual leaders, in the northwest, Sarajevo, Brcko, Gorazde, and Srebrenica. He has been collecting material for a specialized AP webpage on Bosnian refugees, and updating some of his earlier reports.

• Read Peter Lippman's dispatches from Bosnia on our Srebrenica pages.

 
Palestinian Civil Society Struggles Against Impossible Odds
 
Earlier this year The Advocacy Project sent a mission to the Palestinian territories with Grassroots International (GRI), a Boston-based NGO that helps to fund eight Palestinian organizations. Our goal was to profile the work of these groups and lay the groundwork for future support.
 
The mission was shocked by the violence of Israel's occupation, but also inspired by the way that these representatives of Palestinian civil society are risking their lives to monitor abuses on both sides of the conflict. This is the side of the Palestinians - law-abiding, moderate, and respectful of universal values - that rarely makes the headlines.

• Read all about it in this series of 'On the Record,' written from the front lines.

• See how our partner, Grassroots International, uses profiles and photos from 'On the Record' by visiting their Take Action site.

 
Network Against Trafficking Unites Civil Society in Nigeria and Italy
 
AP has agreed to design a website for a new networking project, known as Turnaround, that aims to bring civil society together in Italy and Nigeria to prevent the trafficking of Nigerian women into prostitution in Italy.
 
The project is the brainchild of the Turin branch of TAMPEP (Transnational AIDS/STD Prevention Among Migrant Prostitutes in Europe Project), a network of advocates across Europe that provides a range of social and medical support for foreign prostitutes.
 
Thousands of Nigerian women end up as prostitutes in Italy each year, and many are trafficked. Such is the sophistication and international reach of the traffickers, that they can only be stopped by vigorous action by the two governments, and by civil society, at both ends of the trade. This is the goal of the Turnaround project.
 
Civil society is certainly active in both countries. Last year, The Advocacy Project profiled the work of the Women's Consortium of Nigeria (WOCON), which has led the campaign against trafficking in Nigeria. The series was reprinted in a major Nigerian newspaper.
 
TAMPEP-Turin puts the number of Nigerian prostitutes in Turin at about 2,000 and last year TAMPEP's outreach team was able to meet with, and counsel, about 1,500 women on the streets. Thirty-four women agreed to denounce their traffickers in return for a permit to remain in Italy and work (as provided for under Italian law). But the others remain vulnerable to violence, disease, and deportation. Only three Nigerians have returned home voluntarily this year from Italy.
 
Neither of the two governments has taken vigorous action against trafficking, singly or together. They have signed a Readmission Agreement which would allow the Italian authorities to deport Nigerian prostitutes who have overstayed their visas without even checking their nationality. But this does nothing to help Nigeria reintegrate the women or prevent the trafficking at source. 'After exploiting and infecting many of them with HIV/AIDS, Italy is sending these women back to a country which has no capacity to support them,' says one Italian campaigner angrily.
 
TAMPEP hopes that the Turnaround project can build bridges between civil society in both countries, and so push the two governments to develop a more constructive relationship. As a start, a TAMPEP delegation visited Nigeria in September to begin developing an information campaign in the villages of Edo State that will draw on TAMPEP's own experience of working with Nigerians in Turin. Eventually, Turnaround will also lobby the Italian authorities to provide protection for the prostitutes in Italy, and prosecute traffickers more aggressively.

• For more information on the Turnaround project contact Rosanna Paradiso.

• This year, AP visited two other Italian organizations that are developing links with Nigerian civil society:

• The Rome-based branch of the International Organization of Migration (IOM) has played an important role in helping Nigerian girls to return voluntarily. This year, IOM received a generous grant from the Italian government to build a center in Lagos for deported Nigerian girls prior to their reintegration, and also promote information campaigns in Lagos and Edo State.

• Pellegrini Della Terra ('Pilgrims of the Earth') is a ministry of the Italian Methodist Church based in Palermo, Sicily. It was founded in 1995 by a lay preacher from Nigeria, who works discreetly but effectively in the Nigerian community in Palermo to turn prostitutes against their traffickers.

• To read more about AP's work on the issue of trafficking see our Nigeria website.

Commentary: US Lawmakers Seek to Kill an International Criminal Court
 
Could American forces invade the Hague to rescue an American pilot who was detained in an international court on a charge of war crimes? The idea seems laughable, particularly at a time when the United States is trying to build a global alliance against terrorism. Yet this appears to be one of the aims of a draft law (the American Servicemembers Protection Act or ASPA) that could be passed by the US Congress.

• Read AP's reports from the Rome conference, which established the criminal court in July 1998. 
• Support the work of our partner ICCNOW and the Coalition for an International Criminal Court.
• Read more about the campaign to oppose ASPA at the World Federalist Movement's website.

Letters:
 
Re: Kosovo Women's Network
 
From Elisabeth Meijer, MP (The Netherlands)
 
Congratulations with your Kosovo Women's Network Letter. I am looking forward to the next issue and I wish you a lot of success!
 
Regards, Elisabeth Meijer MP
 
Re: On the Record for Children
 
From Per Miljeteig, Forum for the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Norway.
 
I wanted to tell you how much I appreciated the last OTR Kids issue. Your analysis of the situation in front of the re-scheduled Special Session is very to the point, I think. There is a lot of serious concerns that need to be addressed in the time we have available because of the delay. We need to put pressure on governments to become more sensible and constructive. At least, the NGO community needs to speak out clearly, as OTR does.
 
Best regards, Per
 
Re: Criminal Court commentary
 
From Milimo Moyo, Legal Counsel, Afronet
 
Thank you for your information in respect of the above matter. I am Milimo Moyo and I am in charge of ICC issues within Afronet. I attended the last PrepCom on ICC and learnt how the US was attempting to undermine the ICC process through the Service Members Bill. As Afronet, we shall do everything within our powers to discourage any efforts to undermine the ICC process.
 
I hope to hear from you soon.
 
From Milimo Moyo

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