BEIRUT: Dozens of people gathered outside Beirut’s national museum to light candles for a British woman and three Arab women murdered in the past week in Lebanon.
The killing of the British Embassy worker Rebecca Dykes last week has sparked extensive media coverage in Lebanon, prompting activists to press for more attention to be given to widespread violence against women.
Lebanese women’s rights activists held the vigil to mourn the victims, demand better laws, and to protest against the violence — including the three reported murders in northern Lebanon alone over the past week.
“Society refuses to listen to us or see us until our blood is spilled,” Leen Hashem, an organizer, told the crowd from the steps of the museum. “This violence is structural and systematic.”
“Justice is not only arresting the criminal. Justice is for all; this not to happen to us in the first place,” she said. Participants laid white roses over pictures of the four women, and lined the steps with candles.
Wafaa Al-Kabbout stood on the sidelines, holding a framed photo of her 21-year-old daughter Zahraa, whose ex-husband shot her dead last year. “Now my daughter is gone, she’s not coming back,” she said. “But all these young women are our daughters. And there is still fear for the young women after them.”
The UN says a third of women worldwide have suffered sexual or physical violence.
A 2017 national study by the Beirut-based women’s rights group ABAAD said that one in four women have been raped in Lebanon. Less than a quarter of women who faced sexual assault reported it, the survey said.
“Little by little, we are breaking the silence ... for women to come forward and talk about the violence they are facing,” said Saja Michael, program manager at ABAAD.
In the past five years, women have become more likely to report violence and seek help, she said, though sexual assault remains a bit more taboo. Part of the reason is that NGOs have set up new shelters and community centers, with psychological, legal, medical, and other services, Michael added.
“It’s becoming more of a public discourse,” she said. “It’s no longer what’s happening behind closed doors.”
Violence against women in Lebanon ‘structural and systematic’
Violence against women in Lebanon ‘structural and systematic’
Jailed Tunisia opposition figure handed 12 years in third trial
- Dozens of opposition figures were recently sentenced to harsh prison terms in a mass trial on charges of conspiracy against state security
TUNIS: Jailed Tunisian opposition figure Abir Moussi was sentenced to an additional 12 years in prison on Thursday under a law criminalizing any “attack aimed at changing the form of government,” her lawyer told AFP.
A fierce critic of both President Kais Saied and the Islamist-inspired opposition Ennahdha party, Moussi has been in custody since her arrest in October 2023 outside the presidential palace where her party says she was seeking to lodge appeals against Saied’s decrees.
The latest sentence was in connection to that incident.
This is the third trial against Moussi, who was initially sentenced in August 2024 to two years in prison under Decree 54, a law Saied enacted in 2022 to combat “false news.” That sentence was later reduced on appeal.
Last June, just after completing her first jail term, she was sentenced again under the same law to two years in prison. The appeal process in that case is underway.
In a statement released before Friday’s verdict, the Free Destourian Party condemned “the injustice suffered by the party’s president, Abir Moussi, who has been arbitrarily detained since October 3, 2023.”
She is suspected by her detractors of wanting to return to the authoritarianism of former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, overthrown in Tunisia’s 2011 revolt.
Meanwhile Saied, elected in 2019, has ruled by decree since a sweeping 2021 power grab and many of his opponents have been jailed.
Dozens of opposition figures were recently sentenced to harsh prison terms in a mass trial on charges of conspiracy against state security.
Others are being prosecuted under Decree 54, a law criticized by human rights advocates for its overly broad interpretation by the courts.
