Systematic violations against Yemeni women activists in Houthi prisons
English - Wednesday 02 November 2022 الساعة 06:20 pm
Sana'a, NewsYemen, Hadeel Muhammad:
In her documentary film “Detainees in Houthi Prisons”, which was shown at the Swiss Journalists Club in Geneva, in late March 2021, Bardis Al-Siyaghi presented real stories of women who have tasted the bitterness of prisons and torture, revealing the extent of Houthi crimes and violations against Yemeni women, and the violence they are subjected to in the prisons of pro-Iranian terrorist militia.
As for Maya Amira, Director of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, she described the situation of women in light of Houthi violations, as having transcended the tragedy of Afghan women since the hardline Taliban movement came to power in Afghanistan.
Tehran's arm in Yemen is dedicated to committing various crimes against Yemenis, and it has been a clear and open hostility to Yemeni women, with a desire to take revenge on women, violent them and practice all forms of persecution against them.
The kidnapping and humiliation of female activists is a pattern of systematic violations committed by the Houthis against women, since declaring their war on Yemenis in 2014, as the coup militia committed grave violations against Yemeni women amounting to war crimes.
The kidnappings of women launched by the Houthis after their coup against the state escalated in September 2014, reaching their climax since late 2017, bringing the number of female detainees and abductees in Houthi prisons in 2022, to about 1,800 women, including hundreds of human rights and community activists, media professionals and opponents of the Houthis, most of them in the city of Sana’a. All forms of psychological and physical torture are practiced against them.
The kidnappings of women became a phenomenon in the provinces controlled by the Iranian-backed militia after it promoted what it called a “soft war” that aims to spread prostitution in the areas under its control through women in a speech by its leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi in March 2017, in which he directed his followers to confront this corrupting war, as he described it.
Activist Fatima Al-Arouli, head of the Habitat Organization for Human Rights Development and head of the Office of Arab Women Leaders in Yemen of the League of Arab States, is still subject to enforced disappearance in the detentions of the terrorist militia. Since she was kidnapped on August 3, 2022, from Al-Hawban area in Taiz on her way to Sana'a, due to her criticism of the militia's violations and crimes against the children of Taiz and Al-Bayda in particular and the areas under its control in general.
The armed militia had previously issued a five-year prison sentence against the artist, Intisar Al Hammadi, after she was kidnapped on February 20, 2021 from Hadda Street in Sana'a, and fabricated malicious charges against her before she was subjected to a trial described as illegal.
According to human rights defenders, the Houthi militia deliberately kidnaps women activists as a weapon to silence opposition voices in its areas of control, and frames them to create a stigma for their political oppression, defying the norms and the black flaw in Yemeni custom that criminalizes assaulting or abusing women.
A report by the Red Sea Center for Political and Security Studies published in August 2022 stated that the number of women detained in the prisons of the terrorist Houthi militia exceeded 1,800, 311 cases of enforced disappearance were recorded, and 614 female human rights activists and the educational sector were detained, and that 96 cases of rape were documented. And a number of suicides in the prisons of the criminal militia, revealing the extent of violence that women were subjected to at the hands of the criminal militia, which led to the killing of 1,691 women and the injury of 3,655 others.
In June 2022, SAM Organization for Rights and Freedoms revealed in a report that women detainees in the prisons of the Iranian arm are subjected to immoral methods and horrific physical and psychological torture, including; Depriving them of the sun and toilets except once or twice a day, and long interrogations in the late hours of the night, subjecting them to electric shocks, spraying with cold water, and pulling out their nails.
The "Women for Peace in Yemen Coalition" documented in a report in June 2022, the number of female detainees in Houthi prisons reached 1,421, including 504 detainees in the central prison in Sana'a, and 291 cases of enforced disappearance in secret prisons. In addition to 193 cases of indoctrinating illegal sentences on accusations of espionage and others.
According to the report, the detainees were subjected to the most horrific methods of physical torture, ranging from beatings with sticks and electric wires, electrocution, stopping breathing by suffocation, drowning in water, standing on open cans for hours, starving and being prevented from eating and drinking for long hours. And the prevention of exposure to the sun and ventilation, in addition to psychological torture represented in insult, verbal torture, humiliation, slapping and forcing them to confess to charges they did not commit or immoral charges, while depriving them of their rights to visit their families.
