On 17 August 2023, Brazilian Quilombola leader, Maria Bernadete Pacífico, was murdered while watching TV with her grandchildren at home by unidentified men. According relatives and friends, Bernadete, a former Minister for Racial Equality of Simões Filho, faced threats for her work, especially concerned with the human rights of her community of former Afro-Brazilian slaves.
Hers is not an isolated case. Across the world, it is not rare for leaders of communities discriminated on the basis of their work and descent are intimidated or even silenced.
The violence suffered by members of the Quilombo communities is historically marked by the action of private agents (farmers, squatters, landowners, businesses, local political groups, among others) and the neglect of the state to abandon situation to which these have always been subject.
The Al-Akhdams or Khadems of Yemen live in slavery, illiteracy and isolation at the time of internet, satellite channels, globalization and modernization. They have been relegated to collect waste or to beg. Cruelty is part of how society remunerates this section enslaved by the society in several ways – they are deprived of their rights in all aspects of life.
The Al-Akhdam do not possess any of the basic human rights enjoyed by the rest of the society in Yemen and have to endure violence and particularly humiliating conditions.
Yemeni law has no provisions to criminalise the practise of persecution, exclusion and discrimination against the Al-Akhdam people and Al-Akhdam women are easy targets of violence and abuse and are usually subject to hate-based attacks and sexual assaults.
In Somalia, the Midgan, Tumal and Yibir and Galgala have always been placed at the lower end of Somali society and are subject to societal discrimination in urban centres from other clan groups and harassment where no patron clan protection exists, particularly in rural areas.
According to the Roma survey 2021 carried out by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 13 per cent of Roma people in Italy said that they had been threatened with violence in person in over in the past five years because of their Roma background. The survey was published in April 2023.
In India, where caste dynamics pervade every aspect of life, the malaise cutting across regions, the violence is often heightened as more articulate sections among Dalits oppose killings and rapes. This goes alongside the continued prevalence of manual scavenging, besides other forms of violent discrimination stemming from the Dalits’ descent-based occupations.
The murder of a Roma teenager in Greece on November 11, the third such incident this year, has once again highlighted how the Roma population continues to face discrimination
European Union Member States must formally recognize and acknowledge the existence of discrimination based on work and descent as a distinct form of discrimination that deserves the attention of the international community and that affects communities around the world including among others, the Roma in Europe, a report titled ‘Status of Communities Discriminated on Work…
Crimes against Dalit people rose by 177.6 per cent and crimes against people from tribal communities rose 111.2 per cent between 1991 and 2021. Dalits and Adivasis together account for almost 32 per cent of all prisoners in Indian jails. How are Institutional discrimination and social exclusion related to crime? Data points to a vast…
