Saturday, December 17, 2011

From one of our colonies: A human rights update

From CNN:


Kabul (CNN) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said that a rape victim freed from prison after he intervened on her behalf has the right to make her own choice about whether to marry her attacker.
In an exclusive interview from Kabul, Karzai told CNN's Fareed Zakaria that the woman's case appeared to be a "misjudgment" that had to be resolved.
The woman, identified only as Gulnaz for her own protection, was sentenced to 12 years in prison after she reported that her cousin's husband had raped her.
But the 21-year-old was freed this week following the president's intervention, and is now staying at a women's shelter in Kabul, with the daughter she conceived in the attack and gave birth to in prison.
Her plight attracted international attention when it came out that she had agreed to marry her attacker to gain her freedom and legitimize her daughter.

Perhaps this legal concept will catch on in our other colonies like Korea and Germany, and then spread to the U.S.  If a woman turns down a guy's marriage proposal, he can walk away rejected, or....he can rape her. 

"Hey, how did you two meet?"
"You didn't read about it?  He raped me, and we've been together since, for the sake of the children.  It turns out we like a lot of the same TV shows and movies !"


1 comment:

Hot Sam said...

This is a big improvement over the way these cases were handled ten years ago.

I seem to recall that a rich and powerful capitalist set of colonies used to hold black people as slaves. Women could not vote, hold public office, own land, or attend most universities.

Among those colonies' early founders in a place called Plymouth, adultery was punishable by death. In fact, most crimes were punishable by death.

About 60 years ago, that same nation of colonies interned hundreds of thousands of people of a particular ethnic group because we were at war with their country of ethnic origin.

It's still illegal in most parts of that nation of colonies for same sex couples to marry.

So let's give our "colony" in Asia a few more centuries to get their act together. Our colonies in Korea, Japan, and Germany learned their lessons pretty fast, even though most people thought capitalism and democracy were antithetical to their cultures.

I hear they eat dogs in one of those colonirs though. That's a problem.