Musarat Aziz, A Human Rights Activist Killed By Her Brother In Zhob, Pakistan
New Age Islam News Bureau
3 January 2025
· Musarat Aziz, A Human Rights Activist Killed By Her Brother In Zhob, Pakistan
· Syria's 'Princesses of Freedom' - Khijou and Samar
· Switzerland’s Burqa Ban: A Crossroads of Freedom, Identity, and Social Cohesion
· 'What I Achieved Will Be Destroyed Overnight': Syrian Women Judges Face Uncertain Future Under New Leadership
· Women Gangsters Get Life Term For Promoting Drugs In UAE
· Malaysia’s female workforce shrinksto 38.8% as 3 million quit jobs due to homemaking
Compiled by New Age Islam News Bureau
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/musarat-aziz-human-rights-activist-zhob/d/134233
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Musarat Aziz, A Human Rights Activist Killed By Her Brother In Zhob, Pakistan
Photo: Balochistan Post
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January 3, 2025
QUETTA: A female human rights activist was shot dead by her brother in the Jail Road area of Zhob town, police officials said on Thursday.
They said the tragic incident took place on Wednesday in a house where Musarat Aziz was present along with other members of the family. They said the suspect barged into the house along with his wife and opened fire, killing his sister on the spot and escaped.
Police rushed to the area soon after receiving information about the incident and shifted the body to district hospital.
“She suffered multiple bullet injuries which caused her instant death,” the police officials quoted doctors as saying.
Ms Aziz, a widow, had been heading Toheed Technical Centre in Zhob for the last two years, teaching technical skills to local women for earning a.
Ms Aziz’s brother did not like her social and human rights activities and had asked her to abandon these.
A senior police officer said a meeting was going on in the deceased’s house to take a decision whether or not Ms Aziz should continue her social and human rights activities, when her brother entered the house, along with his wife, and shot Ms Aziz dead.
“We have taken the suspect and his wife into custody for investigation,” a police officer told Dawn.
He said a case has been registered against the suspect and further investigation is in progress.
Source: dawn.com
https://www.dawn.com/news/1882741/human-rights-activist-killed-by-her-brother-in-zhob
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Syria's 'Princesses of Freedom' - Khijou and Samar
Sisters Khijou, left, and Samar al-Khateeb, right [Raghed Waked/Al Jazeera]
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By Madeline Edwards
3 Jan 2025
Moadhamiyet al-Sham, Syria - In years past, the metallic pops of automatic gunfire outside the window would have meant something sinister.
Perhaps, an attack by the regime of Bashar al-Assad on the al-Khateeb family’s once-besieged hometown just south of Damascus.
It would have meant a call to action for al-Khateeb sisters Khijou, 52, and Samar, 45 - time to rescue and give first aid to the wounded, at the risk of their own lives.
But today, as I visit them, the gunfire is celebratory. The al-Khateeb sisters are happy, too.
It’s been one week since former Syrian President al-Assad was ousted after an offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
More than 50 years of al-Assad family dictatorship are now over.
In Khijou’s modest apartment, where she lives with her 20-year-old daughter Mayyasa, the women have already placed a huge green-and-black "Free Syria" flag on display in the living room, surrounded by flowers.
Next to the display is Mayyasa’s ring light, for filming makeup videos. Samar was there, too, visiting from her house in a nearby corner of Moadhamiyet al-Sham. Though Khijou is seven years older than Samar, the two women, kind-faced and serious, could be twins.
They serve trays of Turkish coffee, little biscuits and chocolate cakes. Outside the window, some unseen shooters fire off more automatic rounds into the air. The women are relaxed, chuckling.
But their joy is tinged with a numb pain.
Between them, they have spent more than three years of arbitrary detention in al-Assad’s prisons - already brutal for male prisoners, but a special flavour of terrible for women.
Khijou al-Khateeb was a 39-year-old mother of three and a nurse in 2011, when peaceful protests sprang up across Syria, demanding reform after years of brutal al-Assad repression.
She still doesn’t quite know what compelled her, in those early days, to go down into the streets and take part. “I always ask myself why I did it,” she says.
Khijou knew she could get in trouble with the regime, which began cracking down on the protests almost as soon as they began. Yet she decided to start covering the movement as a citizen journalist, through social media.
But she needed a pseudonym to protect herself and chose Amirat al-Hurriyeh: “Princess of Freedom”.
Knowing the risks, she went to demonstration after demonstration, taking pictures and sending them to news outlets. She also documented her coverage on Facebook.
The authorities soon caught on.
In May 2012, police arrested her and took her to the Military Intelligence Division, also known as Branch 215, a notorious prison in Damascus reportedly responsible for torture and thousands of extrajudicial killings.
Khijou remembers being the only woman there at the time; some guards secretly brought her food at night to help her cope, but she couldn’t eat.
She stayed there for 10 days, and though nobody tortured her physically, “the fear of what might happen tomorrow was difficult on its own”, she remembers.
Once free, she went straight back to citizen journalism and used her training as a nurse to help treat those injured in the war.
But the authorities learned to use this against her.
“Someone called me one day to come help an injured man in the street,” she remembers. There was no injured man: instead, there were police, who took her back to prison.
This time, she shared her cell with another woman, whose body was a frightening omen of the torture going on in the prison. "Her body was blue. Blue, blue, blue, all over," Khijou recalls.
Still, they rarely opened up with one another. “We were scared of each other, we didn’t trust each other,” Khijou says.
The woman could be a plant, she feared - or, as could happen anyplace else in Syria at the time - she could inform on her to the authorities. “She was afraid of me and I was afraid of her,” Khijou recalls.
A few days later, in solitary confinement, Khijou learned of a woman in the next cell who was being held with her two young children, including a four-year-old boy.
“I wanted to see if I could get information from her - her name, how she was doing,” Khijou remembers. When her weekly ration of oranges came, she had an idea.
“I used my hijab pin and poked messages to her on the oranges, which I rolled under the cell wall to her.”
Khijou scratched a mark on the wall of her cell every day, and after 40 ticks, she was released.
In 2013, the Syrian regime began a punishing three-year siege of her hometown, Moadhamiyet al-Sham, limiting the entry of food supplies for thousands of remaining residents.
That August, the regime fired toxic sarin gas on Moadhamiyet al-Sham as part of a series of chemical attacks across rebel-held areas of the Damascus suburbs, killing hundreds of civilians.
Her 21-year-old son, Samir, suffered. “He was already sick [with asthma and chronic nerve issues] when the siege began, so he became very thin,” she says.
She made sure to take pictures of her son’s emaciated body at the time, in case someday they became useful for finding justice. “He was so, so skinny,” she remembers. They would be the last photos she took of Samir.
“I still have them on my laptop,” she says as she heads to a back room of her apartment to fish out the machine.
Khijou steps out of the room in search of the laptop and Samar begins to talk.
“My first arrest was in 2013,” she remembers.
At the time, she was an employee at a pharmaceutical company. Authorities arrested Samar alongside her husband, her elderly mother, her then-11-year-old son Muhammad, and her then-10-year-old niece Fatimeh.
She refers to the incident as a kidnapping.
“That night, they put us in a car and put bags over our heads so we wouldn’t see anything. They took us to a house, we didn’t know where,” she recalls.
They stayed there for about a month, or a month and a half, she figures.
Samar would later learn the group kidnapping was part of an attempt at a “swap”. In exchange for Samar and her family’s freedom, the authorities wanted information on a man thought to have been murdered by someone from Samar’s hometown.
She still doesn’t know exactly why they targeted her and her family.
“I didn’t know anything about the dead man, nor did anybody else,” she says.
Both Samar and her 75-year-old mother, who suffered from diabetes and couldn’t bring her medicine, were beaten in that abandoned house, while guards allegedly brought prisoners into one room of the house every now and then, forcing young Muhammad to beat them with a stick.
All she could muster to comfort the children was to urge them to “not be scared.”
I hear a knock at the front door and Muhammad, now 22, walks in wearing a puffer jacket.
Muhammad tells us he’s still affected by the fear he endured during that time, as a little boy. “My mom would tell us it was OK, that we’d be going home soon,” he says.
When the family was freed, they had no IDs or belongings and had to find their way home alone.
For Muhammad, his future was destroyed.
“I stopped going to school. I hated everyone,” he said.
Muhammad never returned to his studies.
It’s become colder in the room as the afternoon wears on; Khijou hands out thick fleece blankets.
Samar says her second arrest came in 2015.
The police took both her and her husband, a school security guard, on “terrorism” charges. Like Khijou before her, Samar was taken to Branch 215 this time.
“They ordered me to tell my husband to ‘confess’, or else I would have to strip,” she recalls.
Samar's husband had nothing to confess. Samar pauses for a long moment before resuming her story.
“They took me to another room and hit me with green plastic tubing,” she continues.
Samar was four months pregnant at the time, she says.
One day in Branch 215, the guards decided to beat her stomach.
“When I got back to the cell, I started to bleed. So a doctor came to give me medicine, but they decided to put me in a car and take me to a hospital.”
There, they terminated the pregnancy as she lay surrounded by security officers who ordered her not to look up at their faces.
“‘You’re just a terrorist, that’s all,’ they told me,” she says.
She was later transferred to Adra, a civilian prison with comparatively better treatment, where she stayed for three years on a “terrorism” charge.
She’s still in touch with her cellmates from that time, whose phone numbers she recorded with needle and thread in hidden parts of her clothing so the guards wouldn’t see.
I think of her some days later when, in a nearby neighbourhood, someone shows me a huge wall display in his living room of mementos and embroidered flags that were stitched by women trapped in Adra Prison.
About half an hour away from the sisters is Damascus Hospital, where the pain of families like the al-Khateebs is on display.
On the hospital’s outer walls are hundreds of homemade posters of missing prisoners - mostly men - who were lost years ago.
Just one is a woman, KhaldiyehAlloush, her face pixelated and blurry under black hair and a 1990s-style headband.
Syrian rights defenders have long documented mass abuses against the arbitrarily detained.
The Sednaya military prison outside Damascus was dubbed a “human slaughterhouse” by Amnesty International.
More than 100,000 people are thought to have disappeared in al-Assad’s prisons since 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, though more will likely come to light as workers unearth vast unmarked graves.
The true number of women and girls like Khijou - who says “investigators” threatened to rape her and Samar, who lost her baby - may never be known.
A 2021 report by the United Kingdom-based group Synergy for Justice, for which researchers interviewed 80 Syrian female former detainees, found that 81 percent of the women and girls witnessed torture.
Fifteen percent were forced to watch a loved one undergo torture or were tortured in front of a loved one.
Nearly one-third of them saw someone die or be killed.
But female detainees often face social stigma after their release due to shame surrounding sexual violence against some of them in prison.
There are women who just hide the fact that they were detained to avoid the possibility of being shamed.
“There are some people, even now, who don’t know I was a detainee,” Samar says matter-of-factly.
“I was too scared to talk about it.”
Khijou comes back into the living room with her laptop.
“Here he is,” she says.
The picture of her son, Samir, is grim. In it, he’s still alive but his limbs are skeletal. He is starving from al-Assad's siege over Moadhamiyet al-Sham in 2013.
Samir’s ribs jut out from his skin, his bony elbow bent painfully.
Three days later, Syrian officers allegedly kidnapped him after Khijou sent him for medical evacuation with a United Nations convoy. He never came back.
“They took him to the Air Force Intelligence branch, that’s what we were told at the time,” she recalls.
Samir would be 32 years old today, Khijou says - if, by some slim chance, he managed to survive all those years of prison. Other than that, “we don’t know anything”, she says.
Perhaps he went to some other prison, she figures, maybe Sednaya. She is calm and composed at this possibility, a civilian journalist simply pointing out another injustice around her, the years of heartbreak seemingly calcified into the fact of Samir’s likely death.
The chance that he’s still among the survivors becomes slimmer by the day.
Today, Khijou shares his picture and name on social media in the hopes that someone, somewhere, might have information.
Khijou’s other son, Muhammad, who shares a name with his 22-year-old cousin, is also gone. He fled to Germany a year ago through Europe’s forests, the thought of al-Assad’s fall a distant dream.
Khijou supported him in taking the journey, fearing he, too, might get arrested at a regime checkpoint someday and never return.
He’s now stuck in a refugee camp, unable to work or study.
In Khijou’s profile picture on WhatsApp, pictures of the two young men are copy-pasted together side by side, looking so similar - Samir’s clean-shaven portrait from before 2013 next to Muhammad’s more up-to-date beard and moustache, posing in front of a wintry skyline in Germany.
It’s not clear yet what justice might look like for families like the al-Khateebs.
Legal justice for Syrian prison survivors has been limited. In 2022, a German court in Koblenz convicted Anwar Raslan, former head of investigations at the notorious General Intelligence Directorate’s Branch 251 in Damascus, of crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life in prison.
That case was successful because Germany has implemented “universal jurisdiction”, meaning the country’s legal system can prosecute crimes against humanity and other serious cases no matter where the crimes happened.
“So that is still an option, of course, if any perpetrators are found in a country that implements universal jurisdiction,” explains international criminal lawyer Nadine Kheshen.
Inside Syria, things might be different.
As of now, it’s been less than a month since the fall of the al-Assad regime, so it isn’t yet clear how the justice system could play out for prison victims and their families.
“It’s still not clear how the judicial and legal system will look, at least in the transitional period,” says Obai Kurd Ali, a Syrian lawyer and specialist in international human rights law at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.
“People are still trying to understand the new system.”
Most important, for survivors like the al-Khateeb sisters and others, is documenting what happened to them in the hopes of future accountability, Kurd Ali says.
The sisters say they are willing to speak to lawyers and hope to someday “file a lawsuit” over what happened to them in prison.
Khijou says she simply isn’t ready to forgive the people who imprisoned her and her family.
“As female detainees, as mothers of detainees, as wives of detainees, we have no forgiveness,” she says, matter-of-factly.
Behind her is the laptop with images of her son Samir’s starved, skeletal body.
His absence still stings.
Khijou’s husband, named Muhammad, now suffers severe depression.
“It’s been two years now that he hasn’t been able to leave the house. He sits with us at home, but quiet. Silent. He doesn’t speak,” Khijou says.
The elder Muhammad is with us, apparently, in the house, as we drink our sweet tea.
But he remains hidden somewhere in the freezing apartment, beyond a series of closed doors, past Mayyasa’s ring light for her makeup videos, and Khijou’s industrial sewing machine.
For now, the family have their quiet anger.
Source: aljazeera.com
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2025/1/3/syrias-princesses-of-freedom
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Switzerland’s Burqa Ban: A Crossroads of Freedom, Identity, and Social Cohesion
JANUARY 3, 2025
At the call of midnight on December 31 of the year 2024, Switzerland has put in the practice of a new burqa ban, and in this way the question of freedom and culture freedom along with the authority of the state comes again in the front line. It bans full-face veils, like the niqab, in organisations, with penalties of up to CHF 1’000 (approx. 307,700 PKR). This movement coming in a country that once upheld the principle of neutrality and democracy showcases society’s constant fight to uphold individual freedom against the process of assimilation.
The Referendum Debate
The basis for the burqa ban can be traced back to a 2021 referendum in which 51.2 percent of Swiss citizens voted in favour of the ban to explore the extent of diversity in Swiss society. The right-wing supporters of the ban include the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), who stated that such a ban is important for security and integration as well as conserving Swiss culture. Critics, on the other hand, have condemned it as an infringement of the right to religious freedom, particularly for Muslim women who prefer to wear the burqa as an item of faith.
Such characteristics of direct democracy made the law legitimate in Switzerland since people voted on the national level. However, the decisive margin on the right side should not mask the fact that the fighting to balance personal freedom and more and more emerging cultural concerns remains a tallying on for the nation.
The Law’s Provisions
The new law is to prohibit the wearing of the burqa and the niqab in any public place or in a private domain opened for the public. Some times can be excused by medical conditions, religious purposes, climatic circumstances, or some events that are not a threat to the social order. It has been criticised as mimicking legislation existing in France, Belgium, and other European countries, which has led to protests and court cases. Such measures have led to various questions with regard to the governments of Europe on the issue of the freedom of religious practice in society and with regards to the integration of multiculturalism.
Who Is Affected?
Currently, Muslims are few in number in Switzerland but are scattered in all the regions of the country. The cantons with the highest proportion of Muslims living in them in 2019 were Basel-Stadt, where 8.17% of the population were Muslims, followed by Glarus with 7.72%, Solothurn coming third at 7.63%, while Zurich and Geneva had 6.49 & 6.24% of Muslims, respectively. However, what also emerges is that only Geneva from the cantons detailed here has a Muslim population greater than the Swiss average of 5.40%. Immigrants account for 88.3% of the Muslim population, primarily from the former Yugoslavia (56.4%), Turkey (20.2%), and Africa (6%). There are barely 7 to 10 thousand native Muslims in the country, out of a total of 400 thousand people.
Nevertheless, not all Muslim women living in Switzerland wear the burqa. This is a practice carried out by a minority of Muslim conservatives comprising the Salafists among the Sunni as well as certain Shia Muslims of Iranian decent. This raises important questions: do you think that burqa could turn into the weapon of Muslim feminists to defy such legislation for women? If such a movement takes hold, it will not only destabilise Switzerland but also cause severe consequences across Europe, the United States, and other countries with increased tensions.
Tensions and Consequences
Muslim communities are already more managing wider socio-political concerns such as the Palestine crises and Arab Spring. Measures like the burqa ban, to which Muslims can hardly fail reacting as discriminated, excluded, marginalised, lumpen people, are experienced as backlash laws. Sceptics have a lot of criticism on this, saying that such measures only worsen the situation in the country and do not solve anything.
A Global Discussion: Swiss Identity vs. Multiculturalism
Supporters of the ban on burqa argue that this measure was introduced to advance the process of socialisation and increase the level of safety, while estimating that face coverings are obstacles to integration and potential threats to security, particularly in situations where identification is necessary. They stated that such measures are necessary for the protection of the national cultural integrity and security of spaces.
On the other hand, the opponents view the ban as an attack on the rights of religiously practicing people and as the destruction of Swiss values. This law only makes it even more possible for us to be isolated.” This is not an issue of safety; it is an issue of power, opined a Swiss Muslim woman along with other human rights organisations. It will be recalled that these critics argue that such laws risk sharpening divisions in societies rather than bringing them together.
A European Trend?
It is a part of European trends—Switzerland has banned burqa; the same law regulates attire in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Some of these strategies that the advocates of secularism and national identity argue for have been accused of discriminating specifically against Muslim women.
Finally, the most important question in this contest is how the identity and unity of modern society with the multicultural difference can be reconciled. While Europe struggles with this question, Switzerland has made things even more complicated. The implications of this work will probably not only stay for Switzerland but also can contribute to multiethnic nations’ debates in other states.
Looking Ahead
While Switzerland continues with the process of enactment of ban-regulation regarding burqa, it is still hazy regarding its repercussions. Thus, the question out of interest will be whether the law will help to increase social solidarity or, on the contrary, strengthen the existing social divide. Are tolerance, and especially any kind of religious tolerance, and assimilation harmony or opposition in their eternal struggle?
Still now, Switzerland stays at the crossroad in question that serves as a prototype of many states in the modern world being in search of the optimal solution to the conflict of identity between an individual and society. The consequences of this experiment will be most dramatic, both for Switzerland, which has already seen the result of the plan in action, and for broad international debates over multiculturalism and other questions of living together.
Source: counterpunch.org
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/03/switzerlands-burqa-ban-a-crossroads-of-freedom-identity-and-social-cohesion/
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'What I achieved will be destroyed overnight': Syrian women judges face uncertain future under new leadership
02 January, 2025
The fall of Bashar al-Assad's 53-year family dictatorship in Syria has ushered in an era of uncertainty for the country's women judges, who fear their roles in the judiciary may soon be eliminated under the new leadership of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), the resistance group that ended the Assad regime's control over the country.
These fears crystallised after HTS spokesman Obeida Arnaout's recent interview with the Lebanese Al-Jadid channel, where he cast doubt on women's future role in the judiciary while maintaining a carefully measured stance on women's education.
"Women certainly have the right to learn and receive education in any field," Arnaout said. "However, for women to assume judicial authority, this is a subject of closer examination and study by specialists."
His comments about women's emotional and physiological limitations being an "obstacle" to their participation in certain fields have particularly alarmed female judges, who view such statements as discriminatory and religiously motivated biological reductionism.
Women in the Judiciary
The presence of women in Syria's judicial system has been a hard-won achievement spanning decades. When Syrian women were first admitted to practice law in 1975, they faced significant barriers to entering the judiciary.
A Freedom House study revealed that their representation remained notably low for many years, with female judges and public prosecutors constituting just 13% of the judiciary, mostly concentrated in Damascus. This male dominance had far-reaching implications, making women less likely to trust the judicial system or seek justice through the courts.
However, by 2017, women had made remarkable progress, comprising 30% of the judicial corps – a significant increase from the approximately 240 female members (15%) reported by the UN CEDAW in 2012.
Although the Syrian state media portrayed this increase as evidence of the government's commitment to women's rights and gender equality in legal professions, researchers suggest a grimmer reality: the rise in female representation was largely due to the loss of male judges through death, detention, or displacement during the civil conflict.
The current situation has become increasingly precarious for female judges across the country. While Syria's transitional cabinet has not issued formal directives to dismiss women judges, sources at the Homs governorate's Justice Palace report receiving verbal instructions to remove women from judicial positions.
The justice ministry's recent announcement of paid administrative leave for all employees, including judges, until January 6 has been interpreted by many as a gradual strategy to remove women from the judiciary.
Judge ZaheraBashmani, who served as head of the former regime's Counter Terrorism Court, represents the complex reality facing many female judges. Despite her high-ranking position and belonging to the Alawite sect, she emphasises that her achievements came through merit rather than sectarian favouritism.
"I studied law for four years, spent two years conducting research, and took numerous exams," she says. "Now at 58, what I achieved can be destroyed overnight. Islamic Sharia, not the constitution, will be applied under the new leadership."
A 39-page 2020 report by The Syrian Network for Human Rights, described Assad’s Counter-Terrorism Court as a political/security court which aims to eliminate those calling for political change, democracy and respect for human rights.
Based on the accounts of 15 former and current detainees, the report noted that at least 10,767 people still face trial, that the court heard nearly 91,000 cases and ordered 3,970 cases of seizure of property.
It concluded that the court’s primary objective was to provide the regime with official cover for the liquidation of detained and tortured political dissidents and opponents of the regime. It added that the Judicial Authority was entirely dominated by the executive authority and security services.
The uncertainty affects judges across religious and sectarian lines. Tajan Al-Masri, a 43-year-old Sunni judge, faces personal and professional challenges. Having sacrificed her marriage to maintain her judicial career, she now fears losing her professional identity altogether.
Tajan challenges religious justifications for excluding women, noting that Prophet Muhammad himself supported women's participation in various aspects of society, including warfare.
For minority judges, the concerns are compounded. HayaaNaddour, a Christian judge in Homs, fears both religious discrimination and professional exclusion.
"I am Christian, so my calamity will be twofold if all state institutions become Islamized," she explains. "Will I be asked to wear a hijab as well? Even if I can retain my role as a judge, how do I work within a system I do not believe in?"
The transitional government has made some gestures toward women's inclusion, notably appointing Aisha al-Dibs as head of the Women's Affairs Office – the first woman to hold a ministry position in the new administration.
Aisha has promised to engage Syrian women in social, cultural, and political institutions and announced plans for a comprehensive initiative to address the needs of female prisoners who suffered under the previous regime. However, her public statements have notably omitted mention of women's roles in the judiciary.
Political analyst Nihad Tahmaz suggests two possible scenarios for the future of women judges. The first involves giving appointed court presidents the authority to decide whether to employ women judges based on personal discretion. The second, more subtle approach would see HTS avoiding official pronouncements while quietly allowing their appointees to implement changes, thereby maintaining their international image while seeking the removal of their terrorism designation.
Constitutional law expert IssamTakroni points to divisions within Syrian society itself regarding women's roles.
"Those who don't work agree with possible changes to be introduced by HTS, while those who must work and will be harmed stand against these decisions," he explains. The situation is further complicated by Article 23 of Syria's previous constitution, which mandated state support for women's full participation in political, economic, social, and cultural life.
HTS leadership has attempted to distance itself from extreme positions. In a recent BBC interview, HTS head Ahmed Al-Sharaa, now Syria's de-facto leader, promised that Syria would not become "another Afghanistan," citing Idlib province's record under HTS rule, where almost 60% of higher education graduates are women.
However, for Syria's female judges, these assurances provide little comfort as they await decisions that could end their legal careers and fundamentally reshape the country's judicial system.
As Syria enters this new phase of its history, the fate of its female judges hangs in the balance, representing a crucial test of the new leadership's commitment to maintaining professional opportunities for women in one of the country's most important institutions.
Source: newarab.com
https://www.newarab.com/features/uncertainty-looms-female-judges-post-assad-syria
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Women gangsters get life term for promoting drugs in UAE
03 January, 2025
Dubai Criminal Court sentenced an African gang consisting of four women to life jail to be followed by their deportation from the country after serving their sentence, after being charged with possessing psychotropic substances and drugs with the intention of trafficking.
The court also prohibited them from transferring or depositing any money for others, either directly or through intermediaries, for a period of two years after the completion of their sentence, except with the permission of the Central Bank of the UAE, in coordination with the Ministry of Interior. The court also acquitted a compatriot of the charge.
According to the case, which took place in the Business Bay area, a report was received by the General Department of Anti-Narcotics at the Dubai Police, stating that the first suspect in the case possessed psychotropic substances and drugs and was promoting them.
A police officer stated that a team from the department set up a trap to arrest the suspect. Another police officer stated during the interrogations that a female police officer communicated with the suspect, claiming that she wanted to purchase a quantity of psychotropic substances and so they agreed on the place and time to receive the required materials. On the specified day, a trap was prepared to arrest the suspect, who arrived with two other women and a man who was driving the vehicle which dropped them at the location.
The female police woman stated during the interrogations that she received psychotropic substances in the form of prohibited medication tablets from the first suspect, in return for Dhs2,000.
After informing the Anti-Narcotics Department team, the first suspect and the other women, as well as the driver of the vehicle, were arrested. On being interrogated, the first suspect, who was found in possession of other narcotic substances, admitted to promoting drugs.
The other suspects also confessed that they worked with others in promoting drugs and upon searching their residence in Jumeirah area, a quantity of drugs was found.
A fourth suspect was also arrested in possession of a quantity of psychotropic substances prepared for promotion.
The fifth suspect denied any connection to the others, stating that he was transporting them in return for money because they were compatriots but he was unaware of their involvement in promoting drugs.
He added that the first suspect had sent him several times to deliver envelopes, but he did not know that they contained narcotic substances.
Source: gulftoday.ae
https://www.gulftoday.ae/news/2025/01/02/women-gangsters-get-life-term-for-promoting-drugs-in-uae
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Malaysia’s female workforce shrinksto 38.8% as 3 million quit jobs due to homemaking
JANUARY 3, 2025
A concerning trend is reshaping Malaysia's workforce, a growing number of women are
leaving their careers to embrace full-timehomemaking. Recent datafrom the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) reveals that of the 4.8 million women who exited employment, three million cited their roles as housewives as the primary reason. Despite women accounting for 6.72 million of the national labour force, their participation remains significantly lower than men, making up just 38.8% compared to men’s 61.2%. The gender gap in workforce participation persists even as women dominate university enrollment rates. Experts attribute this exodus to a combination of professional and domestic pressures. Prof. Dr Nik Ahmad Sufian Burhan of Universiti Putra Malaysia notes that inflexible working hours, lack of work-from-home options, and workplace discrimination are driving factors. Many women feel undervalued, receiving lower pay despite their qualifications and being passed over for promotions. The impact extends beyond individual households to the nation’s economic productivity. Without intervention, the country risks losing more skilled profession ls, particularly young women. To address this, experts advocate for holistic measures, including flexible work arrangements, stronger legal protections against workplace discrimination, and enhanced maternity and paternity leave policies. Additionally, re-entry programs, financial incentives, and access to professional training could enable women to resume their careers after family-related breaks. By prioritising inclusive policies, businesses and policymakers have an opportunity to retain and empower female talent, ensuring a more equitable and productive workforce
Source: indiatimes.com
https://hrsea.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/malaysias-female-workforce-shrinks-to-38-8-as-3-million-quit-jobs-due-to-homemaking/116901053
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URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/musarat-aziz-human-rights-activist-zhob/d/134233