International Case Law

Hibaq Said Hashi left Somalia for fear of persecution by Al-Shabaab.  She was divorced from one man and married to a second man, but her former husband claimed they were not divorced and she was having sexual relations with another man, which caused Al-Shabaab to call for her to be stoned.  Her father helped her leave Somalia and then he was killed, and her current husband was sentenced to death.  She traveled to Italy by boat, was registered and determined she was pregnant, but she faced poor conditions in Italy so she left for Sweden to have her baby.  When she learned

The plaintiff, an unmarried father, took off six months from work to take care of the child while the child’s mother was working for which he demanded “maternity” leave payments for from the defendant, the  relevant sickness fund. The defendant refused to pay. The German lower social court decided that the legislation only permitted maternity leave and not paternity leave. On appeal, the German state social court involved the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) in order to interpret Directive 76/207 with respect to the raised issue.

The applicant, although at first appointed as a security officer at a State-run electricity company, was informed that she could not be appointed to this post because the post required “being a man” and “having completed military service.” She began working as a security officer after the first instance court ordered stay. Nonetheless, her contract of employment was terminated almost after two years after she lost the case in the appeal. Upon exhausting all domestic remedies, she applied to the European Court of Human Rights in 2008.

Three applicants, all Roma women, alleged that a public hospital sterilized them without their consent and that they were unable to obtain appropriate redress from the Slovakian authorities. Although the Court found that the third applicant’s children lacked standing to continue the proceedings in their mother’s stead, it ruled in favor of the first and second applicants. The first and second applicants argued that they had been denied their right to have a family because the hospital  sterilized them without consent.

A 14-year-old girl was allegedly raped by an acquaintance. She complained that the authorities had failed to investigate her allegations effectively and that the requirement of corroborative evidence of resistance had been discriminatory against her. The Court found a violation of Article 3 on effective investigation and ordered the State to pay the applicant just satisfaction for non-pecuniary damage and awards the applicant EUR 10,000.

Interights, an international human rights organization, filed a complaint before the Commission on behalf of several complainants, arguing that Nigeria's Islamic Sharia courts had violated their rights to a fair trial and due process. The main complainant, S.H., a nursing mother, was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. She was tried under Sharia law, according to which adultery is punishable by death.

The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights found that three men convicted in the 2004 and 2005 bombings on Egyptian resort towns were tortured and denied a fair trial before being sentenced to death by Egypt’s Supreme Emergency State Security Courts, violating the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The Commission ruled that Egypt should repeal the death sentences, immediately release the men, and provide them compensation.

The Italian government’s failure to take measures to ameliorate the less favorable treatment suffered by women falling into certain vulnerable categories with respect to access to abortion services was a violation of Article E (prohibition of direct and indirect discrimination) of the Revised European Social Charter (the “Charter”) in conjunction with Article 11 (right to protection of health) of the Charter.

A Turkish woman was allegedly attacked by the police following her participation in a peaceful demonstration to celebrate Women’s Day in Istanbul and that such police brutality in Turkey was tolerated and often went unpunished. The ECtHR considered that the police officers had failed to show a certain degree of tolerance and restraint before attempting to disperse a crowd which had neither been violent nor presented a danger to public order,and that the use of disproportionate force against the demonstrators had resulted in the injuring of Ms Izci.

In April 1992, the Petitioner was arrested during a raid by DINCOTE, the counter-terrorism branch of the Peruvian police. The police believed that the Petitioner was a member of the Sendero Luminoso, a communist militant group in Peru. During the raid, the Petitioner was blindfolded, beaten and raped by some of the police officers. When she protested the sexual violence, the officers beat and kicked her. After the raid, the officers took the Petitioner to a DINCOTE facility, where she was detained for more than a year in cells infested with roaches and rats.