Kathmandu-born epidemiologist Dr Lhamo Sherpa says that early in her career she began questioning the treatment of women in Nepal
Working at a community hospital in Bouddha, Kathmandu soon after graduating with a medical degree exposed Dr. Lhamo Sherpa to situations that made her reassess the lives being lived by women in Nepal. For example, “there was this childless couple who came for advice. After all the investigations, when I told him the price for in-vitro fertilization… the husband said that he could get another wife (instead) for 50,000 rupees.”
Maternal health in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh continues to make gains despite huge logistical, financial and cultural impediments
A mother and children in a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. PHOTO: UNFPA
Twenty years ago I visited what were commonly called ‘Bhutanese refugee camps’ in southeastern Nepal. (In fact, they were camps of tens of thousands of Nepali-origin people living in Bhutan who had been brutally evicted from that country, with the tacit assent of regional superpower India. But that’s another story.) The tiny bamboo huts where people had to make their new lives were laid out in regular grids on the beaten earth of Nepal’s Tarai or plains region.
So when I imagined the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, that image of rows upon rows of tidy, tiny, bamboo buildings came to mind. It couldn’t be further from the truth. The massive Rohingya camps (housing close to 900,000 people) are located on hilly terrain. Because the Bangladesh Government refuses to recognize the Rohingya — who fled similar ethnic cleansing in neighbouring Myanmar — as official refugees, their ‘homes’ are not uniform buildings but a collection of irregular huts covering the hills.
Revising Nepal’s rape law is a priority but reducing cases of this violent act requires a societal shift
Activists in Kathmandu protest rising numbers of rape and sexual assault cases, October 2020. PHOTO: Courtesy of Ajhai kati sahane?
Almost one year ago, in January 2021, the Government of Nepal updated the country’s rape law. The changes were incomplete, partly because agreed revisions like widening the definition to include men and boys as victims were deleted at the last minute, but it was an improvement.
Changes that were agreed included increasing jail time for those found guilty and criminalizing any attempts to ‘settle’ a rape case outside of the courts, which is a regular occurrence.
“The health system remains unprepared and unlawfully in defiance of a range of orders of the Supreme Court”
A health camp in rural Nepal. PHOTO: Marty Logan
The right to health in Nepal during Covid-19 remains largely a paper promise. In June I wrote about how the government had largely ignored orders from the Supreme Court to act immediately to meet its health commitments in both international and domestic law.
Today the International Commission of Jurists, whose 2020 briefing paper was the centre point of my article, released an updated version—it is equally depressing.
I really appreciated this editorial in The Kathmandu Post on Wednesday, 21 July. It linked two things I care about—human rights and maternal health.
A community health unit and a birthing centre were established in Dhiri four months ago but the number of service seekers is minimal. Prakash Baral/TKP
I really appreciated this editorial in The Kathmandu Poston Wednesday, 21 July. It linked two things I care about—human rights and maternal health.
It noted that the United Nations Human Rights Council has just released a statement calling on governments worldwide to ensure that women’s right to sexual and reproductive health is ensured, among other things. The paper linked that with its recent reporting about women in remote areas of Nepal giving birth at home and even in sheds!
As a new surge in cases overwhelms the South Asian country, people are forced to rely on a frail healthcare system and a government remiss in its duties to uphold their right to health
On 3 May, Lok Bahadur Pariyar, 45, arrived at his local pharmacy in southern Nepal complaining of breathing difficulties. He told the pharmacist that he had been suffering from fever, severe body aches, and cold symptoms in recent days.
Suspecting COVID-19, the pharmacist called an ambulance to take Pariyar to the hospital. The next day, when the pharmacist opened his shop, he was surprised to see the man standing outside. He told him he had visited three hospitals the day before and all had turned him away.
Excerpt from a summary of the communication from the UN special rapporteurs, dated 18 November 2020
Warning shots fired into the air by police to control mobs were responsible for two deaths being probed by United Nations human rights experts, according to the Government of Nepal.
Both Rafikul Alam of Jhapa and Suraj Kumar Pandey of Kapilvastu were “unfortunate” victims of police attempts to control mobs, wrote the Permanent Mission of Nepal to the UN in Geneva in a response to the experts, also known as special rapporteurs, on 10 February.
“It brings the urgency to seek justice even closer when family members are reminded of that small detail that they had forgotten over the years.”
— Pooja pant, memory, truth and justice project
To its credit, the Nepali media has written regularly about successive governments’ lack of action on transitional justice since the Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed in 2006. Reporting has focused on the legal framework, which in 2015 Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled must be revised because it granted amnesty for the most serious crimes of the conflict.
In the civil war, from 1996 to 2006, the state and Maoists combined to kill 17,000 Nepalis, torturing and disappearing thousands more.
The Nepal Government has denied that a joint team from the Nepal Army and Chitwan National Park destroyed homes belonging to landless Chepang people on 18 July 2020.
The operation “removed 8 Katha of maize crop, 9 wooden towers and 2 sheds from the area (but) the operation team has not destroyed any of those 8 HHs [households] Iiving there and any of their property,” says a letter to United Nations (UN) human rights experts dated 21 December.
In this episode of the Nepal Now podcast, Dalit Lives Matter — But to Who? we speak with Pradip Pariyar, Executive Chairperson of the Samata Foundation, an organization that works to ensure the rights of Dalits in this country.
A screenshot of a clip from the Nepal Now podcast episode about Dalit rights in Nepal.
Anyone who lives in Nepal knows about caste and untouchability — the social rules that slot people into rigid groups from which they can rarely escape. At the bottom of the caste hierarchy are the Dalits, previously known as untouchables.
Anyone living in Nepal would also be aware of the deadly, violent crimes committed against Dalits, almost always with no legal consequences. But as you will hear in the introduction to this episode of Nepal Now, the incident reports from the Nepal Monitor provide a sense of the daily indignities and violence that Dalit people face in this country.
The view from here 