Colombia: Women Face Prison for Abortion
Human Rights Watch Joins Challenge to Restrictive Abortion Laws
(New York, June 27, 2005) In Colombia, women can be imprisoned for up to four and a half years for having abortions even in cases of rape or when their lives are at risk. In a brief to Colombia’s Constitutional Court, Human Rights Watch said the country’s penal sanctions for abortion are inconsistent with international human rights obligations and should be declared unconstitutional.
"Women should be not sent to prison for having abortions,” said Marianne Mollmann, Women's Rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Colombia’s restrictive abortion laws violate women’s basic human rights and should be repealed.”
On April 14, Colombian lawyer Mónica del Pilar Roa López, project director at Women’s Link Worldwide, requested the court to review the country’s law on abortion and declare it unconstitutional. Roa’s office was broken into on June 16 and two computers as well as confidential files were stolen. Human Rights Watch is concerned for the safety of all personnel working on this case.
An estimated 450,000 abortions occur every year in Colombia. Recent studies indicate that a higher proportion of adolescent girls than adult women undergo illegal abortions. The consequences of illegal abortions are a leading cause of maternal mortality since illegal and unsafe abortion causes medical complications that can be fatal.
The United Nations treaty bodies that monitor the main international human rights conventions have repeatedly insisted that abortion must be decriminalized at least where the pregnant woman’s life or health is in danger, or in cases of incest or rape. Several of these U.N. bodies have openly criticized Colombia’s restrictive abortion laws, noting that they discriminate against women and violate their right to life and health.
In its submission to the Colombian Constitutional Court, Human Rights Watch also cited findings by regional human rights bodies. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has said that its main human rights treaty, the American Convention on Human Rights, is compatible with a woman’s right to access safe and legal abortions.
Colombia’s law prohibits abortion in all circumstances. The penalty is lighter when the pregnancy is the result of rape (or “nonconsensual artificial insemination”). In 2000, the Colombian Congress amended the penal code, adding the possibility for a judge to waive penal sanctions on a case-by-case basis. However, judges have discretion to waive penal sentences only in cases of rape and under two further conditions: if the abortion occurs in “extraordinary situations of abnormal motivation” (an ambiguous clause that requires judicial interpretation) and if the judge considers the punishment “unnecessary.” However, a later amendment in 2005 also extended the maximum sentences for abortion from three years in prison to four and a half.
“Instead of amending its laws to comply with international human rights obligations, the Colombian authorities have only imposed harsher punishments on women for exercising their human rights,” said Møllmann. “The court has an obligation to reverse this anti-constitutional development.”
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/06/22/colomb11202.htm(What kind of pathetic assholes would put the woman in ####ing PRISON??????)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Peace Patriot, maybe Venezuela should deify murder of political opponents, raising MASS MURDER to a sacred right, by simply calling everyone you want to get rid of "the enemy," then, when you kill him/her, your vicious, savage attack on a human being will NOT be considered a violent crime, but will be termed "defense of the country!"
Colombia has horrified the entire world in its astonishing insanely vicious assaults on villages with chain saws used on living people, all guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of people all over the world who hear about it, not to mention the ultimate resource in paralyzing an entire country with fear, and keeping them terrorized year after year after year after year.
In the U.S., movie makers keep people shrieking in their theater seats by conjuring images of deranged killers with chainsaws. In Colombia, it's all too possible they might might have to meet one up close and personally if they ever in any way can be identified as a political enemy, or even someone living in the same village with someone who has been identified as a leftist sympathizer, or a union organizer, etc., etc.
The level of fear goes UP in a country like Colombia, for every day citizens. This hellish element doesn't even enter into articles written on other countries and their real or attributed crime rates.
As in Chile, Argentina, etc., often resistance to brutal governments went dormant when the people themselves became so traumatized they lived in terror from day to day of being tortured to death, while right-wing idiots trumpeted the "victory" of the fascist government in ridding the country of political resistance, people did NOT forget what has happened to them, and how they perceived it evolved. Any government which controls by fear, which supports treacherous, vicious criminality made institutionalized and confirmed, is a government which will, when the time finally comes, be trampled underfoot and never will return for generations well into the future, until its memory is almost impossible to recall.
Venezuela is moving in the direction of IMPROVING the lives of the poor. Keeping on the same path, Venezuela will have overcome barriers to education, adequate nutrition, shelter, medical care, etc. which were insurmountable in the past, and root causes of helplessness, hopelessness, frustration and rage at institionalized cruelty and privilege which empty into the turmoil from which crime emerges.
That won't be the case in Colombia, a ship passing Venezuela in the night, as Venezuela heads toward a new day, and sunlight.
Which country would one choose in which to be poor, anyway, as if there's any doubt!
Chances for people's survival in Venezuela, regardless of how much crap is fired aloft and wildly spun, are far WORSE in Colombia than the countries struggling to get out from under the fascist boot heel.
Also, remember that in countries like Colombia, where MILLIONS of the citizens have been driven out of their homes by death squads, and the property becoming the property of the death squads, or then the Colombian government, when dislocated people in THE MILLIONS are unavailable, as part of the SECOND LARGEST HUMANITARIAN CRISIS IN THE ENTIRE WORLD, for pretty little POLLS by the government lackies, and so many other citizens neither have phones, nor are likely to be visited by pollsters to get their opinions noted, actual POLLS on popularity of little, sickly tyrants are going to be completely unreliable. It also has to be remembered since Colombian journalists have indicated they currently SELF-CENSOR, that the citizens themselves would beyond all doubt SELF CENSOR for survival when answering any questions. All stats on Colombia are going to be bogus. Even death rates, as you know, since so many people have simply vanished into thin air (later to be discovered in the only too thick dirt of mass graves) and so many are actually buried as "the enemy" when BOTH the Colombian military and the Colombian death squads count simple citizens as FARC terrorists after they kill them, a fact not lost on the human rights groups.
Sorry this is all so poorly thought out, but it's easy to see there are things going on in this U.S. taxpayer-financed little hell on earth which simply don't exist in Venezuela, so comparison of that country, or the others to fantastically twisted, perverted governments like Colombia's will be something which can't be factored and described by mere stats. Can't be done!
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