The Asian Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) has set up Task Forces to address the challenges of various women's issues in the region. The following is a list of the heads of each Task Force.
Task Force on Women's Human Rights
Convenor
Madhu Mehra is a lawyer, working on women's rights as well as human rights issues generally, from New Delhi. She is engaged with research, programme development with women's groups and in conducting trainings on CEDAW, Women/Human Rights both within the country and regionally; and is a founding member of Partners for Law in Development; a programme promoting human rights and legal advocacy in India. The organisation facilitates partnerships and organisations with local lawyers. In the past, she has worked as a Convenor on Women's Rights with Coordination Unit set up to facilitate and coordinate country wide preparations and participation of NGOs for the Fourth World Conference on Women.
Co-Convenor
Cecilia Hoffman is a coordinator of CATW-AP. Her work in the mid-80's with Filipino migrant women in Europe where she was co-founder of a migrant women's organization and a Philippine Center, led her to a feminist analysis of the issues of labor and marriage migration, as well as of domestic violence, prostitution and trafficking. In the Philippines, she was involved in campaigns against US military prostitution and since 1992, in legislative advocacy for women. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women is an international network of feminist groups, organizations and individuals fighting the sexual exploitation of women. It believes that the sexual exploitation of women in all its forms, including trafficking and prostitution, the bride trade, military prostitution, pornography, and sex tourism constitute severe gender discriminations and the violation of the human rights of women. CATW-Asia Pacific, active since 1993, undertakes a broad range of activities and interventions, notably policy advocacy including drafting and lobbying for legislative proposals, preventive information/education seminars on migration of women, sex trafficking and prostitution especially for and with grassroots communities, training on women's human rights documentation. An essential and important component of CATW's work, carried out by its member organizations lies in organizing and supporting organizations of women in prostitution, and in providing direct service intervention for women and girls in prostitution or victims of trafficking.
Task Force on Labour & Migration
Convenor
Agnes Khoo is a social worker and community organizers from Singapore who has been actively involved in the local and regional student movements and subsequently, on human rights issues to Malaysia and Singapore. A graduate from the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, where she studied Politics in Alternative Development Strategies. Agnes worked in the International Institute of Social History, Royal Academy of Arts and Social Sciences in the Netherlands and was also Research and Policy Consultant for Greenpeace International in Amsterdam before joining the Committee For Asian Women (CAW) where she is present the Programme Officer. CAW is Hong Kong-based NGO working with and for women workers in Asia. It currently has a network of about 28 groups in 13 Asian countries, spanning South Asia, SE Asia, as well as East Asia. CAW's work mainly centers around the industrial as well as the informal sectors, trying to bring women workers from the trade unions, women organizations and autonomous groups together, to share and exchange their experiences and organizing strategies.
Co-Covenor
Hameeda Hossain is currently director of Research and Advocacy at Ain-O-Salish Kendra, a legal and human rights resource centre of which she is a founder member. She did her D Phil in Modern History in Oxford. Her research work has ranged from social history of textile workers and issues related to women;s employment. Current research work is on migration, trafficking and oral histories of women in political and social movement.
As an activist in the women's movement she has been engaged particularly with issues of women's employment and organization and violence against women. She is associated with several women's and human right networks. Her publications include Company Weavers of Bengal-Textile Production from 1750 to 1813 (1988), No Better Options: Women Industrial Workers in Dhaka (co-authored), Coping With Disasters in Bangladesh: Crisis and Development (co-edited), Barriers to Women Rights Negotiating with the State and Community (1997). She has written extensively on gender issues, rural industries and textile and craft history.
Task Force on Women's Participation in the Political Process
Convenor
Nandini Samarasinghe is a lawyer by profession and Coordinating Secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sri Lanka. Nandini is also a consultant to the Law and Society Trust which is a non-profit making NGO committed to improving civil and political rights and social, economic and cultural rights and equal access to justice. The Trust has designed activities and programs, commissioned studies and publications and held workshops and seminars which have attempted to make the law play a more meaningful role within society. The Trust has taken a leading role in the South Asian region on questions relating to human rights, democracy, minority protection and gender equality.
Co-Convenor
Marily C. Cepe is a lawyer from the Philippines who has been involved in various development issues for many years. She has been the Executive Director of BATAS (Center for People's Law) for a number of years.
BATAS is a legal resources center which aims to use the law to empower the disadvantaged sectors. Legal education and paralegal training are used as primary strategies.
Task Force on Rural & Indigenous Women
Convenor
Fatima Burnad is an activist and president of SRED (Society for Rural Education and Development) who has been working among the Dalits, landless and tribal women for the past twenty years. Her main motive and involvement is to promote people's movement among the unorganized sector, empowering rural women to take up political power, uplift them economically through land struggles and see they gain equal status in the society. Working towards a change of society where all are treated equal. She is involved in landless labourers movement, rural women's liberatioon movement, Tamilnadu Dali Movement and Tamilnadu Irula Munetra Sangam. She has also promoted a state level Forum, Tamil Nadu Women's Forum, for bringing women's groups as well as human rights groups together. TNWF has contacts with more than 250 groups in Tamil Nadu. She tries to co-ordinate and support TNWF/SRED activities by involving herself totally for the cause of the poor, to strengthen people's movements to demand for justice and equality. She is a trainer and a resource person at various seminars/workshops conducted in and around the country. Fatima has studied in the US and in the U.K. and has been a Research Fellow at the IDS, Sussex in the U.K.
Co-Convenor
Elisa Tita Lubi shifted to peasant organising from being a manager in an American corporation during martial law years in the Philippines. After two arrests by the Marcos dictatorship, she worked as a development consultant to people's organisations and NGOs. She was again arrested, and this time sexually assaulted by the military under President Corazon Aquino. Upon getting out of jail, she joined GABRIELA which had campaigned for her release as a political prisoner.
GABRIELA is a national alliance of more than 150 women's organisations from every spectrum of society which protests comprehensively against "globalization" and particularly against the structural adjustment program package of liberalization, deregulation and privatization. Tita is also currently on the National Economic Executive Committee of BAYAN, multisectoral alliance of militant organisations, and on the Board of Directors of SELDA, an organisation of former political prisoners.
Task Force on Violence Against Women
Convenor
Ivy Josiah is the Convenor of the APWLD Task Force on Violence Against Women. She is also Executive Secretary of Women's Aid Organisation (WAO) in Malaysia which opened in 1982 as the first women's organisation in Malaysia to provide shelter for battered women and their children. WAO plays a leading role in advocacy work, public education and law reform on domestic violence. As a WAO representative, Ivy has worked on the Malaysian National Policy on Women and Aids. She was also actively involved in the drafting and lobbying for the implementation of the Domestic Violence Act in Malaysia and is presently involved in the monitoring of its implementation. Ivy is also a member of the Five Arts Centre theater company and a guest commentator on the television program 'Moving on 2'.
Co-Convenor
Noor Farida Ariffin is a lawyer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Malaysia and founder member of APWLD. From 1988 until 1993, she served as Director of the Women and Development Programme (WDP) at the Commonwealth Secretariat. Her other feminist NGO activities include being a member of the Association of Women Lawyers Malaysia of which she was past President and also Vice President of the Women's Aid Organisation. This organisation focuses on issues of violence against women and among other things runs a shelter for women and children who are victims of violence within the family. She is also a member of Sisters-in-Islam, an organisation which does research and advocacy work on women's rights in Islam.
