You will, of course, be aware of the “incident” that occurred in Vitry-sur-Seine on October 4, 2002: the murder of Sohane, the seventeen-year-old girl who was burned alive in the trash bin area of an apartment complex on the outskirts of Paris. She was taken there by force and put into a bin by a lover she had rejected. He had the support of several boys from the neighborhood.
On the same day a young man of North African origin was shot dead by a drunken maniac in Dunkirk. That act was immediately, and quite rightly, described as a racist murder and condemned by the highest authorities of the state. Racism is “a cancer that must be rooted out from our society,” said the minister of the interior. Despite its obviously sexist nature, the barbaric murder of the girl, on the other hand, was not interpreted as such and did not give rise to any official protests.
Both the media and public opinion used double standards, as became abundantly clear in the aftermath: demonstrations of anger and therefore violence in the case of the young man and abyssal silence in the case of the young woman.
Now Sohane’s murder is, in structural terms, no different from the general degradation suffered by women in these housing projects. This time death has revealed the end result of the insecurity and violence of which women are the victims.
For many years I have tirelessly pleaded—addressing the president of the republic, in 1992 and on other occasions; the United Nations’ World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 and its conference on women in 1999; and also, as a member of the European Parliament, speaking out from within the Parliament’s Committees on Women’s Rights, on Civil Liberties, and on Foreign Affairs from 1994 to 1999—for the rights of women to be made an integral part of human rights and for an antisexist law modeled on the existing antiracist laws. These measures would advance the fight against sexism:
• In France I have proposed that our Constitution should be modified in such a way that the enjoyment of the “sacred and inalienable rights” enshrined in the Preamble of 1946 be extended to “all human beings,
whatever their sex, and without distinction as to their ethnic background, religion, opinion, or sexual orientation.”
1• At the international level I made a direct approach to Ibrahima Fall, the secretary general of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, proposing that the basic rights of women should be enshrined as an “inalienable, integral, and indissociable component of the universal rights of human persons.”
• In Europe I have proposed that we broaden the fight against racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic discrimination to include sexist (misogynist and/or homophobic) discrimination and that we amend all texts, reports, and resolutions accordingly.
As you know, proposals to enshrine and implement these demands have, for over thirty years, met with—and still meet with—very stubborn resistance. And yet women are still being immolated in France, in Europe, in India, in Bangladesh, indeed all over the world.
President of the Republic Jacques Chirac put it forcibly in Johannesburg: “Our house is on fire, and we are looking away. The earth and humanity are in danger, and we are all responsible…. We cannot say that we did not know. We must be careful to ensure that future generations do not see the twenty-first century as the century of crimes against life.”
2This time it was the body of a woman, the first home, the bodily home of all human beings, that was burned. How can we say nothing and do nothing?
I count on you to help us in our efforts to raise awareness, educate the public, and amend the laws.