The International Campaign Against Honour Killing (ICAHK) website, down for several months, is now back up again. Their latest features include a piece on the level of abuse suffered by women in Yemen, and a look at the recent death sentence given by a Sharia court in Catalonia to a woman charged with adultery. You can read about ICAHK here.
Diana Nammi, co-founder of ICAHK, is also the director of the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO). You can read here, and here (via), about the government's withdrawal of funding for IKWRO:
Police define “honour” crimes as offences motivated by a desire to protect the honour of a family or community, and they include such things as murder, rape and kidnap. In the past year such offences have rocketed in London by as much as 40 per cent, according to the latest figures from Scotland Yard. Reported instances of intimidation and attempts at forced marriage have also increased by as much as 60 per cent.
So it would seem much of Diana’s time is spent talking to the media, she says, trying to draw attention to the scale of a problem which she attributes to the rise of fundamentalism among Muslim communities. IKWRO is one of the organisations on the frontline, fighting this surge and protecting the fundamental and universal rights of women from the Kurdish, Iranian, Turkish and Arabic communities living in the UK.
Much of the work done by the organisation is on a volunteer basis. To date IKWRO employs three full-time operatives and three part-time. The remaining 15 are all volunteers, which should not detract form the value of their work. Diana started out as a volunteer herself when she started IKWRO in 2002 and only began to pay herself a wage two years ago.
“I believe volunteers can make big changes here,” she says. “I’m not optimistic of government help but I am optimistic of charities and those people who want to help. I hope they will reward institutions like ours.”
She has good reason to be mistrustful of government. On November 19th, the Office for the Third Sector announced that it was scrapping the Campaign Research Programme which had promised a total of £750,000 to 32 small charities across the UK....
The minister for the Third Sector, Angela Smith, says she scrapped the grants as a measure “to support the third sector during the recession”. Applicants have now been told that the Campaign Research Programme, which was intended to help small charities advocate for change, no longer exists.
Recession or no recession, the announcement came as a devastating blow to Diana, coming as it did only three weeks after the OTS sent out formal offers of funding. IKWRO had been offered a £19,000 grant for a Kurdish Outreach worker. The work done would have been costly but effective – many of the women need legal advice, counselling and sometimes a new identity – but now that is not to be. IKWRO simply doesn’t have the funds.
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