No Peace Without Justice, in cooperation with the National Union of Eritrean Women, is organising an East Africa Sub-Regional Conference on the Eradication of Female Genital Mutilation, to be held in Asmara, Eritrea, on 27-28 March 2008.
The Conference, which is organised with the financial support of the government of Italy and in partnership with UNICEF, is part of NPWJ’s international campaign for the development of a legal, political and social environment to promote and protect the human rights of women and girls and the abandonment of FGM, which has already had a significant impact through a range of activities, including the Cairo Conference of June 2003, the Nairobi Conference of September 2004, the Djibouti Conference of February 2005, the Bamako Conference of February 2006 and the Khartoum Workshop of December 2007.
The meeting is convened in the occasion of the first anniversary of the adoption by the Eritrean Government of the Proclamation 158/2007 prohibiting FGM and will provide the opportunity for a regional discussion on the development of policies and strategies aimed at the abandonment of the practice and its recognition as a violation of human rights.
From Eritrea, participants will include representatives from the relevant ministries, as well as from local and national decision-making bodies who have been involved in the discussions of local by-laws prior to the Proclamation, and subsequently have been active in the outreach about the national legislation. Foreign participants include governmental and civil society actors from the region, from the member countries of the Eastern African Sub-regional Support Initiative for the Advancement of Women (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda) as well as from Djibouti and Sudan.
For more information, contact Alvilda Jablonko, Coordinator of the FGM Program, on ajablonko@npwj.org or Nicola Giovannini on ngiovannini@npwj.org or +32 (0)2 548-3914.
Program of the Conference
