Colombia: Attempted Shooting of Rights Lawyer Raises Questions of Political Will
Colombia: Attempted Shooting of Rights Lawyer Raises Questions of Political Will
Posted: 05/13/2012 1:07 pm
Mónica Roa did not think twice when the lights went out in her office at 5:00 p.m. last Monday. Power outages are a common occurrence in Bogotá, so Roa, a well-known human rights attorney, and two colleagues continued on with their meeting. But at 6:30 pm, a bullet hit the window next to Roa's desk, sending glass shards into the room. As she raced to the stairwell to alert others, she heard another shot. Her bodyguard, who was outside when the attack happened, counted six shots in total.
In all likelihood, the attack against Roa was timed with this week's sixth anniversary of Colombia's landmark Constitutional Court decision revising one of the world's most prohibitive abortion laws. Roa, the program director of the international rights group Women's Link Worldwide, had filed the closely-watched case, which eventually liberalized the no-exceptions law and allowed for abortion in the instances of rape, incest, severe fetal abnormality, or when there is a risk to the life or physical or mental health of the woman.
The country watched spellbound as the first person to seek an abortion under the new law came forward -- an 11-year-old girl who had become pregnant after being raped by her step-father. Her grandmother had heard about the change in the law and brought her to a local hospital. Women's Link Worldwide represented the girl as the hospital, which had been unaware of the legal change, at first resisted and then sought to make sense of its new obligations.
That was just the start of the struggle to implement the law. Women's rights activists say the Constitutional Court ruling and subsequent case law are exceptionally clear in defining how the decision should be implemented. However, the country's most powerful legal officer, Procurador General and author of The Gender Ideology: Tragic Utopia or Cultural Subversion, Alejandro Ordoñez, has been throwing up roadblocks to enforcing the decision, rooted in his personal religious beliefs.
More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-becker/women-colombia_b_1503584.html