Normally, a budget is read in style. This time, due to delay in keeping the deadline as stipulated by the new constitution, the speaker of the National Assembly refused the finance minister to read the budget, but instead allowed him to read it as a government statement.
The budget was supposed to be read at the same time as Uganda and Tanzania was doing.

The new constitution is bringing great change to Kenya as those in power are no longer the bosses. The Kenyans now have a voice and can challenge those running the country. They now have the right to be heard and if not, they can take the leaders to court.

President Kibaki, Kenya’s third president will leave a good legacy when he steps down next year. It is during his leadership that Kenya got the new constitution, a revolution in itself.

Next year, Kenyans go to elections and the country will have 47 functioning Counties with county governments, a step in the right direction that will give Kenyans a big say on local level.

By Korir, Chief editor.

Norway will provide an additional NOK 30 million to Côte d’Ivoire. The money will be used for reconstruction and reconciliation efforts. The aim is to help to stabilise the situation in the country.

Minister of the Environment and International Development Erik Solheim visited Côte d’Ivoire this week to help to consolidate the peace that has been achieved and to support the ongoing reconciliation efforts. His programme included a visit to Duékoué in the western part of the country, where the worst massacres during the four-month-long conflict took place.

“Women in the refugee camp told me heartbreaking stories of what had happened. Bullet holes and skulls in nearby houses bore silent witness to the atrocities that have taken place here,” said Mr Solheim.

He now hopes that Ivorian society will start functioning again, and that the country will manage to get back on its feet.

“It is terrible to see the destruction and suffering that has been caused by the conflict. On the other hand, the outcome could have been a lot worse. It is a step forward that the elected President, Allasane Ouattara, is now in power, but he has an immense task ahead of him. Militias need to be disarmed, and the rule of law must be re-established. It is important that he facilitates reconciliation,” said Mr Solheim.

Norway has previously provided NOK 60 million in the form of emergency relief, in addition to money channelled through the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF). This means that the total assistance provided by Norway amounts to NOK 100 million.

Allasane Ouattara won the presidential election in November last year, receiving 54% of the votes, whereas Laurent Gbagbo received 46%. Mr Gbagbo refused to step down, and in April he was arrested following a brief war. Intense fighting and looting in Abidjan and in the western part of the country have caused extensive suffering. Close to one million people are internally displaced.

By the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway
Duty Press Officer:June 6 2011

HIV/AIDS: Straight Talk with Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores

Photo: Marit Miners

Elizabeth Pisani

NAIROBI, 7 June 2011 (PlusNews) – Epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani raised eyebrows in 2008 with her book, The Wisdom of Whores, a frank account of her experiences working in the field of HIV/AIDS, from the politics of raising money to conversations in the backstreet brothels of Bangkok. She spoke to IRIN/PlusNews:

Question: Why have HIV prevention efforts failed to curb the spread of the pandemic?

Answer: Prevention has failed for many reasons. One is that we didn’t actually start prevention until we had reached such a critical mass of HIV infection that prevention was always going to be difficult. The higher the prevalence in the population, the more effective prevention needs to be just to keep levels constant, let alone lower prevalence.

Globally, we missed some really easy wins when it comes to HIV prevention. One was needle exchange programmes for injecting drug users. Countries which have adopted these policies and adjusted their laws to accommodate them have virtually wiped out HIV among these populations. Unfortunately, a lot of countries have chosen not to do that, including the US and Russia.

Another easy win is providing commercial sex workers with condoms, lubricant and sexually transmitted infections screening; this isn’t promoted nearly enough, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, even though the evidence shows that it is fairly easy to achieve very high levels of condom use in commercial sex.

We’ve been very selective about our use of different HIV prevention methods. Prevention tools must work in four major ways in order for them to succeed – they must work behaviourally, technically, politically and financially – if any one of these things is missing, prevention won’t work. Abstinence, for instance, works technically – you are definitely not going to get HIV through sex if you abstain – but behaviourally, studies tell us that abstinence doesn’t actually work very well, so telling people to cross their legs for the rest of their lives isn’t really going to prevent HIV.

Q: What is the truth within the HIV response that we’re ignoring and why?

A: One of the great distortions is the gender thing; we’ve spent a lot of time acting like it’s all about innocent women versus wicked men, when in fact it is impossible for heterosexual transmission to occur in the millions without both sexes being involved. The fact is, women like to get laid too. In sub-Saharan Africa, young women entering marriage are more likely to be the infected partner; more men will infect HIV-negative wives while married, but still, about one-third of new infections in marriage are a result of women infecting their husbands.

This fantasy of the innocent woman has led to some misdirected programming such as women’s empowerment programmes and microfinance – both of which are useful, just not in the case of HIV. What should have been done is extremely aggressive promotion of condoms and sexual health services, especially in the context of sex work, much earlier on. We’re still not focusing enough on commercial sex.

We’ve dichotomized HIV epidemics as generalized and concentrated, but even in generalized epidemics, commercial sex work contributes a much higher proportion of new HIV infections [than the general population].

Q: Treatment as prevention – is it the answer to ending the AIDS pandemic?

A: I think treatment is the answer to ending AIDS, but I don’t think it is the answer to ending HIV, which is an important distinction. I don’t think that it is financially feasible to scale up treatment to the levels it needs to reach in the population in order to end HIV transmission.

For those of us who worship at the altar of the randomized control trial, the recent HPTN 052 study gave us very good evidence that HIV treatment reduces infectiousness, something we’ve known for a while. But it has only proven this at an individual level; it doesn’t tell us about the population level, whether the low viral load can be maintained in the entire population on treatment for the entire lifespan of this population while still ensuring newly infected people – who are highly infectious – are not infecting other people.

In addition, the study excluded people who were not able to adhere to treatment – that meant drunks, people who travelled for work and so on, did not participate in the study. People in the study were in a well-supported trial situation, and we don’t know if we can feasibly recreate such a situation in the real world.

One of the great distortions is the gender thing; we’ve spent a lot of time acting like it’s all about innocent women versus wicked men… The fact is, women like to get laid too

This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t treat more people, and treat them earlier than we do at the moment. It is bound to reduce the infectiousness of people infected with HIV so it will certainly have an impact, but because treatment allows people to stay alive and sexually active for much longer it won’t, in itself, be enough to wipe out new infections.

Q: In your book, Wisdom of Whores, you make the case that in Asia, HIV prevention should focus on high risk groups such as sex workers and IDUs. In East and Southern Africa, where HIV is much more generalized, what is the best way to approach HIV prevention?

A: I genuinely don’t know what to do for HIV prevention in sub-Saharan Africa, and if anyone else has got ideas that really work I don’t see them being put into practice. I would predict that incidence is unlikely to fall, and there’s a fair chance that it will rise.

On the other hand, if it is possible to provide and keep expanding treatment at a higher CD4 count and sustain it without it undermining the progress of other health and development issues, then HIV may not – eventually – be such a big deal. Members of the ‘AIDS mafia’ – such as myself – won’t say that HIV is not a big deal because we come from the generation of AIDS, when people died, which was a very big deal. But today, if HIV treatment is affordable and available and an HIV-positive person is in a well-managed situation, truthfully, HIV is really not that big a deal.

What I mean is it is not a big deal for an infected individual; it is a huge deal for health systems and tax-payers who have to manage the epidemic, and there is a real threat of drug-resistant strains emerging and taking us right back to the age of AIDS.

Q: In Wisdom of Whores, you say in the past the epidemiological data on HIV was presented in ways that aimed to cause alarm and spur increased AIDS funding. Has this changed – is the data we see today more reflective of the truth about the state of HIV?

A: I think it’s getting harder to beat up the statistics the way we used to, and perhaps there has also been a realization that it can be counterproductive to the work you are doing – you might get the money but you can’t do what you need to with it.

There is a greater realism compared to the earlier years, and I think there is less distortion even than five years ago. Perhaps lessons are being learned, or perhaps I’ve just been out of the UN system for too long to see what’s going on.

kr/kn/mw source www.irinnews.org

Analysis: New laws have little impact on sexual violence in DRC

Photo: Gwenn Dubourthoumieu/IRIN

Rough justice: Few rape cases result in prosecution

BUKAVU, 7 June 2011 (IRIN) – Five years after the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) revised its laws against sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), these crimes continue to go unpunished because of judicial inaction and a legal culture at odds with the changes. The laws, ignored and misinterpreted, have left escalating numbers of sexual violence survivors unprotected, and perpetrators free to violate again.

When the penal code was amended in 2006, it was intended to “prevent and severely reprimand infractions relating to sexual violence and to ensure systematic support for the victims of these crimes”, according to the text. To this end, it included previously ignored sexual violations addressed in international humanitarian law, and toughened up sentencing for those who violated the vulnerable, including children, the disabled and subordinates.
These new laws should have protected a 13-year-old girl in Kinshasa from being sexually assaulted by two of her teachers. Indeed, they are both standing trial for the crime. But efforts to bring them to justice were initiated by the girl’s family, not the state that promised to support survivors. Her father had to pay a “fee” of US$60 – his entire monthly salary – to submit a complaint to the judicial police officer.

“The measures taken by the family are already a great exception, and proof of great courage,” lawyer Claude Kaniekete Boba told IRIN during the first hearing. Most survivors never see their lawsuits progress to actual trials. This girl’s family had to seek legal aid from an NGO with access to a UN-supported clinic. “Without the legal clinic we would never have had access to a lawyer,” her father said.

Most magistrates show little regard for the revisions to the law and prefer to highlight their perceived failings, such as the requirement for police to open a case within a month of receiving the complaint, according to Josiane Mutombo, a lawyer at the UN Joint Human Rights Office (UNJHRO).

“People think that we are doing too much to address sexual and gender-based violence and that giving so much importance and energy to this problem is absurd,” said Mutombo.

Such attitudes sit uneasily with the data.

Extrapolating from a survey of 3,436 women in 2006 and 2007, a study published in May by the American Journal of Public Health found that 1.8 million women in DRC had been raped during their lifetime. For the survey period, the rate was 48 rapes every hour, with most attacks committed by husbands or partners.

“Not only is sexual violence more generalized than previously thought, but our findings suggest that future policies and programmes should focus on abuse within families and eliminate the acceptance of and impunity surrounding sexual violence nationwide while also maintaining and enhancing efforts to stop militias from perpetrating rape,” the authors concluded.

Even if there is no consensus on the quantitative extent of SGBV in DRC – where just one in 20 cases is thought to be reported to the authorities – any numerical debate is meaningless to Denis Mukwege, a doctor who heads Panzi Hospital in the South Kivu capital Bukavu, which specializes in treating rape survivors.

“This question of statistics is not relevant,” he told IRIN. “We know that the plague continues in a massive, violent and dramatic way. We shouldn’t talk about figures, we should act.”

Legal issues

The law is really not recognized among the population and even among magistrates. It is not adapted to the realities of Congolese life

But while the 2006 revisions were designed to beef up options for legal action, they clash with other laws and certain cultural norms. Sexual contact with someone under 18 is now automatically defined as rape, but the Family Code permits women to marry at 15, for example.

“The law is really not recognized among the population and even among magistrates,” explained Marie Josée Mijinga, president of the Association of Women Magistrates. “It is not adapted to the realities of Congolese life.

“In Bantu culture, a woman who has been raped is dirty, and she is excluded from the community,” Mijinga told IRIN. Thus, a woman who has been raped must weigh her desire for justice against the social consequences. Incest survivors are sometimes silenced by other female relatives, afraid of losing the income that the male offender brings the family. “The mother silences the whole thing because she thinks, ‘It’s he who ensures that I eat’,” explained Mijinga. “Between sacrificing a little girl or the whole family, her choice is quickly made.”

She added that the law was also open to abuse by families of girls younger than 18 who used accusations of statutory rape against older boyfriends to extract dowries and pledges of marriage.

This financial desperation works the opposite way as well, when women being sexually harassed at work refuse to report it lest they lose their jobs.

Cases that are brought to the police are not guaranteed to be pursued. Less than one in three SGBV cases presented to law-enforcement agents in North Kivu was investigated in 2010 for example, according to the UN Development Programme’s access to justice and legal protection project.

Mijinga blamed some of this unresponsiveness on financial problems. The police had neither vehicles, nor even an office to receive complaints. “The police, who don’t even have a pen, do not have the means to lead an investigation or to go on the ground and gather proof,” said Mijinga.

The 2006 laws set a requirement for police to open cases within 30 days of receiving the complaint. “Without this strict timeframe… it would be worse,” said Yvette Kabuo, assistant lawyer at the legal clinic of the Panzi Hospital. “Judicial staff wouldn’t do anything for years.”

Photo: ICRC/W. Lembryk

Many rape survivors are stigmatized and access to medical treatment is rare

The burden of proving allegations that do go forward usually falls on the survivor alone. Magistrates often wrongly demand a medical certificate as proof before they will register a complaint, according to Epiphane Zoro, a magistrate working with UNJHRO. Even though it is illegal, magistrates also demand fees to prepare cases, and to ensure that they progress. Claims of indigence require a certificate, which must be paid for.

Magistrates and security forces are also hesitant to investigate perpetrators in influential positions. When cases do go to court, judicial decisions are sometimes twisted by corruption so that the guilty may buy their freedom. The ease with which suspects bribe or escape their way out of custody leaves survivors even more afraid to testify for fear of reprisal.

Kabuo, the Panzi hospital lawyer, said the problems lay more with the judicial system than the law. “Our programme here had to be put on hold for months because there was no magistrate in the jurisdiction. In 2008, only 10 perpetrators were arrested out of the 49 cases presented.”

The Minister of Justice has said he would recruit 2,000 additional magistrates, but has yet to do so.

Recommendations

Given the lack of confidence in the judicial system, many survivors choose to handle sexual assault allegations at the family level. This allows them to avoid the shame and stigma of publicity. But it also means some survivors must marry their rapists. “The traditional chief of the village or family sees the marriage of a young girl to her aggressor as a kind of reparation,” explained Zoro. “Even the victim sometimes shares the same wish. She prefers this solution to dishonour, and the impossibility of marrying afterward since she is no longer a virgin.”

A round-table discussion was held in Goma in early May to evaluate the implementation of the 2006 laws and to advocate to the government on how to better enforce them.

Recommendations included reinforcing sentencing by freezing perpetrators’ assets and creating an aid fund for survivors. The definitions of forced marriage, rape, and sexual harassment also needed revision.

The international community, keenly aware of the problems of SGBV in the DRC, is committed to seeing an end to impunity through increased judicial strength and awareness. “The professionalization of the national security services and strengthening of the judiciary are essential for human rights, humanitarian access and the protection of civilians,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in an 18 May address to the Security Council. “The cycle of impunity must end.”

cs/jb/am/mw source www.irinnews.org