judiciary). The protocol is a triumph for the efforts
of the African regional office in Nairobi of the
Lawyers Alliance for Women, an initiative of
Equality Now (based in New York). Several states
have already made reservations to the protocol on
grounds of conservative jurists’ interpretations of
Islamic law. The role of African Muslim women’s
organizations in the drafting and, now more
urgently, the implementation of the protocol has
yet to be fully researched.
It is clear that all the major women’s NGOs need
international finance and high profile participation
in United Nations women’s international confer-
ences in order to survive. The extent of financial
underwriting from wealthier Muslim governments
has not been comprehensively researched. There is
a further need to study the organizational culture of
African Muslim women’s NGOs as well as the role
of Muslim women in non-Muslim women’s human
rights organizations. Such studies would include
mapping whether and how African Muslim women
should organize themselves to create a Muslim
human rights identity, and how they decide whether
to coordinate with other religiously neutral organ-
izations on human rights affecting all women.
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wluml.org>.Christina Jones-PaulyTurkeyTurkish women, who have had the vote since
1934, still experience human rights violation and
discrimination in modern Turkey. There is no clear
form of Kurdish dress but Kurdish nationalists,
both male and female, are exposed to discrimina-
tion regardless of whether they dress according to
secular or Islamic norms. However, recent interna-
tional pressure, especially from the European Union
(EU), has promoted greater human rights for
women and encouraged them to more freely ex-
press their demands. The new Civil Code of 2001
consolidated the equal status of women within the
family by annulling men’s position as head of fam-
ily, supporting women’s right to take decisions in
marital matters, and granting them an equal share
of the assets accumulated during marriage.
Nonetheless, numerous Turkish laws on sensitive
matters such as the Kurds, military interference in
politics, and political Islam still curtail freedom of
expression and association. Violation of these laws
is punished by fines, imprisonment of journalists
and politicians, and closure of Kurdish and Islamic
political parties. The leaders of these parties lose
their political rights, as well as their right to publish
their newspapers and broadcast on television.
These restrictions are based on the assumption
that the use of the Kurdish language and Islamic
discourse threatens national security. In other
words, the rationale for these restrictions is that to
acknowledge the ethnic and religious heterogeneity
of Turkish society could undermine the republic’s
unitary and secular structure. These fears have been
exacerbated by two decades of armed clashes
between the separatist Kurdish guerillas and the
Turkish security forces and by the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism.
Dissidents are frequently “disappeared,” tortured,
and ill-treated, particularly in southeastern Turkey,
inhabited mainly by Kurds. Detainees, routinely