Rights Report Documents Houthi Violations against Women in Yemen
SMA NEWS – Sana’a
A human rights report shed light on the Houthi militias’ violations against women in Yemen in the past three years.
It accused the group of the arrest and enforced disappearance of 1,181 women during the mentioned period and their exposure to killing, torture and rape.
The report was released on Friday during a seminar organized by the Women for Peace in Yemen Coalition, the March 8 Bloc for Yemeni Women and the Yemeni Organization for Combating Human Trafficking.
It documented 274 cases of enforced disappearance, and 292 arrests of human rights activists from the education sector.
It also documented 246 arrests of relief and humanitarian workers, 71 cases of rape and four suicides, in addition to dozens of detention cases of male and female children with their mothers.
According to the report, 321 female detainees have been released while 293 female minors are still in Houthi prisons.
The violations included killing, disfigurement, detention, arrest, kidnap, torture and sexual violence, the report noted, adding that female detainees were raped by supervisors in the militias’ prisons.
It recorded several suicide attempts by the detained girls in the central prison in Sanaa, stressing that Houthis did not allow medical examinations and the launch of probes into causes of deaths inside the detention centers.
“The detained women were subjected to all kinds of physical torture, including beatings with sticks and electric wires, slapping, suffocating and waterboarding, in addition to verbal insults and demeaning and psychological torture to confess to things they did not do, as well as fabricating malicious and immoral accusations (concerning prostitution networks).”
During these three years, hundreds of cases of arrests and detentions against Yemeni women and even foreign women working in the humanitarian, media, and human rights fields and political activists were recorded, especially in the capital, Sanaa, and the Houthi-run governorates.
The human rights report reviewed the testimonies and stories of a number of cases, calling on the militias to release all the women detained in official and secret prisons and those held in police, criminal investigation and political security departments in Sanaa and Dhamar, and to stop arresting more women.
It also urged the militias to disclose the whereabouts of detained and forcibly disappeared women and release them immediately, allow human rights organizations, feminists and human rights activists to visit detainees and provide them with legal aid and to halt all practices of gender-based violence against women.
