Houthis continue to violate Yemeni freedoms – Details
The Houthi terrorist militia has introduced a new repressive mechanism that violates Yemeni women’s rights to freedom of dress and movement as it seeks to replicate the Iranian regime’s principles in this regard.
The Houthi militias have returned to target the owners of women’s clothing stores in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, promising them to shut down their shops and prison them for a year with fines if they do not comply with instructions to remove multicolored abayas from their shops, Middle East reported.
Human rights sources in Sanaa accused the leader of the militia, Abdul Karim al-Houthi, who is the interior minister in the coup government, of continuing to tighten the noose on owners of women’s abaya shops in the capital, issuing new circulars under the pretext of the soft war being waged against them.
The militias have vowed to launch a new targeting campaign against women’s clothing shop owners in various areas of Sanaa to gage their adherence to their teachings.
In mid-January, the Houthi group summoned the owners of women’s abaya shops in Sanaa to a meeting with security leaders to brief them on instructions from the so-called “ethics committee” of the Revolutionary Committee headed by Mohammed Ali Al-Houthi. The committee set guidelines and restrictions regarding the tailoring and selling of women’s abayas, and imposing strict penalties on violators. At that meeting, coup officials informed the owners of the cloak stores that they were obliged to sell specific quality and certain specifications.
Meanwhile, Houthi militias in Ibb Governorate, through their student body, have issued new instructions preventing students from engaging with female students in graduation projects and course research.
Activists circulated on social media a document containing instructions from Hamza al-Zayyadi, a Houthi student appointed by the group as president of the University Student Forum (an oppressive and espionage Houthi entity), to Ahmed Abu Lahoum, vice president of Ibb University for student affairs, obliging him to prevent students from collaborating with female students in preparing projects and researching. Activists described the move as “a dangerous and unusual precedent in the history of Yemeni universities”.
Under the directives, the presidency of the coup-prone university in Ibb banned joint research between male and female students.
The group has also launched campaigns to suppress freedoms and pressure female and male university students. The most recent of these campaigns was the issuance of directives that required segregating female and male students, specifying entry and entry gates for male and female students, specifying specification for modest clothing and haircuts, and others.
On February 6, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that “the Houthis are violating the rights of women and girls in Yemen, increasingly imposing restrictions on women’s freedoms since they took control of Sana’a in 2014.”
“UN human rights lawyers have sent a letter to the Houthis detailing the group’s systematic violation of women’s and girls’ rights, including their rights to freedom of movement, freedom of expression, health and work, as well as widespread discrimination against them,” the rights group said in a statement carried by AFP.
