A
WORKSHOP ON RELIGION AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS:
CHALLENGES FOR INTERNATIONAL NGOs
January 18 - 19, 2008
PARTICIPANTS
Rebecca Tinsley
Waging Peace
Rebecca Tinsley is a director of Waging Peace, an organization that campaigns against genocide and systematic human rights abuses. Formerly with the BBC, as a journalist and author she has traveled in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, writing for publications such as the New Statesman, Times, Independent and Telegraph. She has published two novels. Rebecca Tinsley has stood twice for parliament and was national chair of the Union of Liberal Students. She is on the Human Rights Watch London committee, is a trustee of the Carter Centre UK and the Bosnian Support Fund, and is a founder and director of the Rwanda Girls School. She holds a law degree from the London School of Economics.
Waging Peace puts a particular focus on Africa and on atrocities overlooked by the international community where minorities have been persecuted on racial or religious grounds. The organization’s current priority is Darfur, but Waging Peace works to secure the full implementation and enforcement of international human rights treaties wherever it is active and produces regular, high-level and in-depth research reports which support the call for urgent, effective and measurable action from the international community.
Paragraph Statement
Question: What do you think is the most important issue involving religion that confronts international NGOs?
If I can submit just one thought on the subject, it is that Western NGOs should not get trapped into being overly respectful of local religion/tradition/rituals/magic. (Religion and magic are very closely related in many parts of Africa.) Many supposedly religious traditions entail the exploitation and subjugation of girls and women, and in millions of cases a year, the abortion of female fetuses and the mutilation of little girls. Many of the religious rules that we Westerners romanticize were created and are upheld by men because they maintain their hegemony in their societies. We should always put universal human rights before local ritual or faith.
