Dear Members of the UN Commission on the Status of Women,

We the undersigned organizations write to express our deep concerns about the latest restrictions on civil society participation at the 2017 UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meetings. This year's CSW is taking place under the shadow of the United States’ escalated anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and anti-Muslim policies, which are preventing some women from exercising their right to political participation at UN Headquarters in New York.

Human Rights Council, 34th Session - Statement by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID)

“Time and history have never seen eye to eye .Time laughs at history and time and time and time again. Time traps history in a lie .But we always ,somehow, managed to roar history back onstage to take another bow to justify, to sanctify the journey until now” by James Baldwin

The latest development in the NGO Foreign Funding Case occurred on December 7, 2016, when Azza Soliman, a prominent women’s rights defender and lawyer was arrested and faced with three preliminary charges, including “receiving foreign funding to harm the state’s interests.” Azza was released on bail after she paid 20,000 Egyptian pounds, pending further court hearings.

The prominent Syrian human rights defenders Razan Zaitouneh, Samira Al-Khalil, Wa’el Hamada and Nazim Hammadi, who remain missing three years after armed men abducted them, should be released immediately, 56 human rights organizations said today, on the anniversary of their abduction.

Front Line Defenders, in partnership with a network of more than 20 national and international organisations, is currently working on the development of an International Human Rights Defenders Memorial, which will document the cases of all those human rights defenders killed since the adoption of the UN Declaration of Human Rights Defenders in 1998.

Women’s rights defender, writer and blogger Ghada Jamsheer remains in jail in Bahrain serving a combined ten-month sentence for exercising her right to free expression on Twitter.

The regional coalition for women human rights defenders (WHRDs) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is outraged by the arrest of both Kurdish WHRDs Ayla Akat, spokeswoman of the Free Women’s Congress (KJA) and a leading figure of the Kurdish women’s movement, who had participated in the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) 13th Forum in September 2016, who was arrested by the Turkish authorities on Wednesday 26 October 2016, which followed the arrest of WHRD Gültan Kısanak, Co-Mayor of Diyarbakir Metropolitan Municipality on Tuesday 25 October 2016.

July 21, 2016

FINAL NGO MG intervention to the official meeting 7/18/2016.