International Women’s Day, 2020
The world celebrates today, Sunday, March 8, International Women’s Day[i], an occasion to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women, who have played an extraordinary role in the history of their countries and communities. Despite the achievements made in many countries in promoting women’s rights and equal rights between men and women, however in many countries of the world women still face many obstacles, especially in the field of work, participation in public life, and in their personal security.
In the job markets around the world, the gap between women’s and men’s income for the same job remains, according to the International Labor Organization[ii], “On average, women earn 77% of what men earn.” In Parliaments, in 2019, the proportion of women parliamentarians was no more than 25%. One in three women still suffers from gender-based violence.
In Libya, due to the deterioration of the security situation as a result of armed conflicts, women’s rights in Libya have regressed on several levels, especially with regard to the standard of living and violence. In 2019, Human Rights Solidarity documented several cases of enforced disappearances of women in Libya[iii].
As the world celebrates International Women’s Day, the fate of Dr. Siham Sergewa, a member of the House of Representatives for Benghazi, remains unknown nearly eight months after she was violently kidnapped from her home in Benghazi by an armed group affiliated with the Tariq bin Ziyad Battalion. The United Nations Support Mission in Libya described in a press release[iv] the kidnapping[v] of Dr. Sergewa as: “a clear attempt to silence one of Libya’s prominent female voices and to intimidate other women seeking to participate in the country’s political life”. The threatening of the head of the Seventh Criminal Circuit at Benghazi Appeals Court, Judge Fatima Al-Masri, by an armed group, is another incident of threat of violence to dissuade women from working in the judiciary[vi].
In Libya, women suffer from difficult humanitarian situations as a result of the armed conflict. They have been victims of hostilities more than once, in addition to bearing the additional burden of displacement from their homes. For example, in Tripoli and its environs, the mayor of Abu Salim announced that 5 women were killed in April 2019 due to the indiscriminate shelling in more than one locality in the municipality[vii], and the killing of an elderly woman and the injury of several members of her family due to the bombing by the so-called “Operation Dignity” on the district of Shurfat al-Mallaha, near Mitiga airport[viii]. In the southern Libyan town of Murzuq, two women, one of them was pregnant, and nine children, were killed in an air strike[ix] carried out by an “Operation Dignity” drone.
In general, Libyan women suffer from the deterioration of the security situation due to armed conflicts and the increasing criminality, the deterioration of economic conditions as a result of the lack of liquidity in banks, salary delays, and high inflation. Women bear the brunt of the collapse of the economy and the difficulty in obtaining services, especially as they bear greater role in caring for their families. For example, scenes of queues of women waiting for long hours in front of banks and being subjected to verbal and physical violence by “security personnel”, bank guards[x], were frequent. This year, there were reports of verbal and physical harassment of nurses and doctors at the public University Hospital in Sabratha. The female staff were subjected to verbal and physical harassment by members of the “Operation Dignity” militias, which led the hospital administration to close it as a result[xi]. There is very little data available on violence against Libyan women, including sexual harassment, in Libya[xii].
Violence and the spread of crime has led to a decrease in women’s participation in the general elections. In the elections of the General National Congress (GNC), July 7, 2012, 624 women out of 3,700 candidates ran, and 33 women were elected[xiii]. In the elections of the Constituent Assembly, February 20, 2014, 64 women out of 649 candidates ran, 6 women were elected in constituencies reserved for women, and no women succeeded in open constituencies[xiv]. In the last general elections held in Libya, the elections of the House of Representatives (HoR) on June 25, 2014, 32 seats were reserved for women out of the 200 seats in Parliament, and the representation of women in the House of Representatives is equivalent to 16% of the members of the House[xv].
At the local elections level, municipal councils, Law 59 of the Local Administration[xvi] System granted women at least one seat. This means that the electoral system must be translated in a way that allows for more than one seat for women in the municipal elections. However, this did not happen, as these elections resulted in the selection of only one woman for each municipal council, regardless of the population.
As for the elections of Municipal Mayors, only one woman is a Mayor of a municipality from the 112 municipalities in Libya, which is negligible, especially since this Lady Mayor was not elected as a Mayor but was appointed to acting mayor of a vacated mayoral position[xvii].
In prisons and detention centers, hundreds of women in Libya, citizens and migrants, are subjected to grave violations, where they are subjected to brutal patterns of torture, sexual abuse, and other forms of abuse and inhumane treatment in prisons and detention centers, the vast majority of whom are victims of arbitrary detention. Grave violations documented by international reports, and amid complete silence by the Government of National Accord (GNA), the internationally recognized Government of Libya, and the unrecognized “Interim Government”[xviii].
Human Rights Solidarity
Tripoli – Libya
[i] United Nations: “International Women’s Day, 8 March”.
[ii] International Labor Organization: “Tackling sex discrimination through pay equity”, updated May 2016. ILO: “Differences in remuneration between women and men exist in all countries. The difference between their earnings, expressed as a percentage of men’s earnings, is estimated to be 23% globally. In other words, women earn on average 77% of what men earn. This is known as the gender pay gap”.
[iii] This was the first time Human Rights Solidarity (HRS), in over two decades, has documented cases of enforced disappearances of women in Libya. HRS started monitoring human rights in Libya on 10th December 1999. A report by Human Rights Solidarity on the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearance: “For the first time, in Two Decades, we have documented the enforced disappearance of women in Libya”, 30th August 2019.
[iv] United Nations Support Mission in Libya: “Three months after the kidnapping of MP Sergewa, UNSMIL calls for her immediate releases and all victims of enforced disappearance in Libya”, 17th October 2019. Despite national and international demands to reveal the fate of Dr. Sergewa and demands for protecting her from torture and to release her, the security forces affiliated with the unrecognized “Interim Government” which controls the city of Benghazi, continued to remain silent toward those demands.
[v] Dr. Sergewa was not the only victim of kidnappings and disappearances of women in during 2019. An armed group in Benghazi abducted a 68-year-old lady, Magbula el-Hasi from her home in Benghazi on 14th October 2019. Ms. el-Hasi is a licensed alternative medicine practitioner. Her fate is still unknown despite appeals by her tribe. Also, in Benghazi, five women, Sudanese nationals, were abducted on several incident in October 2019. The bodies of two of them were discovered on two deserted locations in Benghazi, and both bodies bore signs of torture and had bullet wounds. The fate of the remaining Sudanese, nurses, remains unknown, nor were there any news of investigations into these kidnappings and killings. In Derna, militias loyal to renegade Maj Gen Haftar reportedly abducted five women from two families in May 2019, and there is no information about their fate. The article by Libya Observer “Haftar’s Militias kidnap women in Derna”, 27th May 2019, reported that 3 women from al-Bahbah family, and a woman and her 2 daughters were from Ben Khayal family. However, HRS has confirmed from other sources the abduction of three women from al-Bahbah family, and the abduction of Ms. Najiah al-Kawwash and her daughter Selima Ben Khayal accompanied with her 4 children. The number of women who are victims of Enforced Disappearance in Libya, might be far greater than the 12 cases mentioned in this report (Dr. Sergiwa, Ms. el-Hasi, 5 Sudanese Nationals, and 5 from Derna), because of the chaotic situation of proliferation of militias, weakness of the central government, and lack of media coverage, especially in the city of Derna. According to information available to HRS, there is around 200 women being detained at Mitiga Detention Center in Tripoli, and scores of women being detained in the Air Academy Military detention in Misrata, majority are women detained by the Bunyan al-Marssouss (BAM) military campaign to liberate the city of Sirte from ISIS. Also, scores of women are detained in Benghazi, Gernada and ar-Rajma, in Eastern Libya. There is no information about the identities of all these detained women, nor any information on whether all of them have been able to communicate with their relatives since their arrest, or not.
[vi] The Libyan Association of Members Judicial Bodies condemned in a statement the incident, describing it as: “unethical, criminal, and unlawful act, and demanded that those responsible be immediately apprehended”, a news article published on the Libyan News Agency website, on October 30, 2019.
[vii] The Libya Observer: “6 civilians killed and 26 injured in the shelling of Abu Salim district by Haftar’s forces”, 17th April 2019.
[viii] Libya al-Ahrar: “Air raid by Haftar’s airplane kills a woman and wounds her family in Tajoura”, 29th December 2019.
[ix] Libya al-Ahrar: “9 children and 2 women, one of them pregnant, were killed in Umm al-Araneb”, 1st December 2019
[x] The New Arab: “Increased sexual harassment in Libya”, Osama Ali, March 20, 2019.
[xi] Ean Libya: “Haftar forces harass women in Sabratha”, 24th February 2020.
[xii] The scarcity of data on sexual harassment is perhaps because women in Libya tend not to report on such crimes out of fear of social stigma, in addition the lawlessness and the prevalent impunity.
[xiii] 540 women participated in the election on Party lists. The system of reciprocal nomination for the names of men and women on the lists of parties, with the names of female candidates topping the lists with the same percentage allocated to men, resulted in 32 women out of 80 seats allocated to Party lists in the elections of the GNC (40%). On the other hand, 84 women ran in the Individual constituencies, that is, independent women who do not represent political parties. Thus, the percentage of women candidates in the individual constituencies is 0.35%, which is a low percentage, and one woman won a seat, out of 120 seats allocated to individual candidates (0.83%). The number of women members in the GNC was 33, out of 200 seats. Thus, the representation of women was 16.5% of the members of the Congress, and this percentage is higher than the percentage that was proposed, in the draft of the GNC election law, for the minimum representation of women in the GNC, which was set at 10%. See Hibag Othman, “Libyan women won 33 seats in the elections of the Congress, the first elections held in Libya since 1952”.
[xiv] The participation of women as a candidate in the elections of the Constituent Assembly (CA), for the drafting the constitution, decreased significantly, as the legislature did not use the same criteria specified by the elections law of the General National Congress to ensure a greater percentage of representation or participation for women. In the CA elections, the number of women candidates was 64 women out of a total of 649 candidates (10.1%), and this represented a significant decrease from the number of women who ran in the GNC elections, and not a single woman in the CA was able to secure a seat in the general electoral constituencies, where men and women compete for the same seats. As a result, women occupied only 6 seats out of the 60-members CA, they won their seats in 6 districts where only women candidates ran. The number of women candidates reached 11% on average, out of the total number of candidates in eleven electoral constituencies, and the highest recorded was 43% in the Tripoli electoral constituency, while the lowest participation was recorded 0.01% in the constituencies of Ajdabiya and Ubari. “Women’s Participation in the Electoral Process from the perspective of the Electoral Commission (the Libyan case)“, a report published on the website of the High National Elections Commission, Libya, 2014.
[xv] In the elections of the House of Representatives (HoR), Libyan women failed to achieve greater representation than the GNC elections. The Law of Election to the House of Representatives, Law No. 10 of 2014, set a quota for women in the HoR, 32 seats were allocated, out of the parliament’s 200 seats, for women to run in women candidate constituencies, thus of representation of women in the HoR was set to a minimum of 16%. Law No. 10 of 2014 excluded parties from running, thereby reducing women’s chances of winning seats. In the GNC elections, Libyan women won 32 of the 80 seats allocated to political parties and alliance lists, i.e. 40% of the seats.
[xvi] DCAF, Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance: “Law No. 59 of 2012, Concerning the Local Administration System”, 18th July 2012.
[xvii] Abeir Imneina: “Women’s participation in political elections in Libya: What have we learned from the previous elections?”, Libya Tribune, 27th March 2018.
[xviii] Libya Akhbar: “A human rights organization holds the Libyan Authorities responsible for the violations of rights of hundreds of women in prisons”, 9th March 2017.
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