The New York Times reported last week on the attempt by the Justice for Magdalenes group to resent their case at the UN as an example of the Irish state’s violation of Human Rights.
Carol Ryan wreported: For years, it was Ireland’s hidden scandal: an estimated 30,000 women were sent to church-run laundries, where they were abused and worked for years with no pay. Their offence, in the eyes of society, was to break the strict sexual rules of Catholic Ireland, having children outside wedlock.
Although it has been over a decade since their story came to light, the women are still waiting for an apology, and possibly compensation.
Now, an advocacy group, Justice for Magdalenes, which has spent the last two years lobbying the Irish government to investigate the history of the laundries, is taking the case to the United Nations, alleging the abuse amounted to human rights violations, and hoping that an official rebuke from the international body will shame the government into action.
“We don’t take any pleasure in embarrassing the government in this way but we have worked the domestic structure as far as we can and still the government has done nothing,” said James Smith of Boston College, a spokesman for Justice for Magdalenes.
The United Nations is examining Ireland’s human rights record this week as part of the Universal Periodic Review, a review of the human rights records of all 192 member states. The U.N. Committee Against Torture invited Justice for Magdalenes to make a statement in Geneva after reading their submission about the alleged abuses in the laundries.
Maeve O’Rourke, a Harvard Law School human rights fellow, presented the Magdalenes’ case last Friday. She told the committee that the Irish government’s failure to deal with the abuse amounted to continuing degrading treatment in violation of the Convention Against Torture. She also said the state had failed to promptly investigate “a more than 70-year system of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of women and girls in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries.”
More at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/world/europe/25iht-abuse25.html?_r=1