International Women’s Day

Jo Swinson Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz).

I always find these debates a challenge, because we have 90 minutes to discuss the topic of international women’s day—“Half the world. Discuss” in an hour and a half. There is far too much to say, so I wanted to share three stories of three international women whom I have had the pleasure to meet in the past three years.

In 2010, I went to Grozny with the esteemed Labour peer Lord Judd to investigate the human rights situation in Chechnya. Of all the meetings we had—we met high-profile people, human rights ombudsmen and so on—the most memorable was with a mother who came to see us wearing a thick black woollen coat and a dark pink patterned head scarf. She sat down and placed into our hands photographs of her brother, her son and her daughter, who had all been “disappeared”. She was not sure whether they were rotting in a Siberian jail on trumped-up charges or whether they had been assassinated or executed. What struck me was her bravery. At great personal risk, she came to tell that story to visiting parliamentarians, because she wanted to make sure that others did not have the same experience. That culture of impunity and the human rights abuses in Chechnya are still a source of great distress, but such women are courageously making sure that they tell the story.

Last year, at an event attended by various hon. Members and organised by the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), I met Selay Ghaffar, who is the Afghan executive director of Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan. She spoke movingly about the battles she is facing to get justice for women and girls who are married off at the age of 12 or 13 and effectively treated as slaves. For the slightest offence, as it were, they can suffer horrendous violence, for which there is no justice or redress. Her work is done at great risk. She was on her way to the Bonn conference, which my hon. Friend the Minister attended, to ensure that the voice of women in Afghanistan was heard.

Just last month, along with the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn), I went to Kurdistan in Iraq, where we spoke with women parliamentarians. The Kurdish MP Shawnem Barznji was absolutely inspirational when she spoke about the battle she had fought. She brought together women MPs in Kurdistan, and increasingly the clerics—she ultimately got the support of the President—to tackle violence against women and to get a law passed that would ban female genital mutilation. That was not an easy alliance to build, but it was inspirational to see what was being done. From chatting to women MPs in Kurdistan, I can tell hon. Members that we share many of their frustrations as parliamentarians—they also face confidence issues, which I often hear from women in politics here in the UK.

Those are just three of the 3 billion or so women in the world, but they are representative. In every country around the world, whether they are journalists, mothers, campaigners, representatives, activists, carers, entrepreneurs or friends, women make that difference. We know that women are suffering. Women bear the brunt of many of the world’s problems, whether from climate change, poverty, conflict or the impact of violence. However, there is cause for optimism. The women whose stories I have described; the women we see every day in our constituencies who make such a fantastic difference in our communities; and the many women who inspired the Arab spring give us cause for hope for the future. Women are making a difference, and it is right that we take the opportunity of international women’s day to celebrate those women and redouble our commitment to equality at home and abroad.