Nobel Women's Initiative

Police in Sudan arrested 48 Sudanese human and women's rights activists during a peaceful protest on December 14.  The activists were protesting the brutal public flogging of a Sudanese woman by Sudanese police, which was captured on video. 

Lashes are a common form of punishment in Sudan, however women are not usually flogged in public. Activists are using the public flogging and subsequent arrests as an opportunity to challenge Sudanese laws. 

Little has been done to end the conflict [in Darfur], now in its fifth year. Hundreds of thousands are dead, hundreds of thousands are in refugee camps in Chad, and millions are displaced inside Darfur. Rape, endured by countless thousands of women, continues to be used as a weapon of war. Thousands of villages have been razed, crops and livestock have been stolen or destroyed, and water has been polluted in a scorched-earth policy of ethnic cleansing carried out by Khartoum and its allied janjaweed militia. Splintered and splintering rebel groups are no saints either when it comes to human rights, but the overwhelming responsibility for the war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur rests with the government.

~Excerpt from Jody Williams and Desmond Tutu's Working together to save Darfur, Christian Science Monitor, 21 June 2007