By Ballah M. Kollie The Executive Director of Community Healthcare, Naomi Solanke, has cautioned that women will only support aspirants who will champion their cause and concerns in their political manifestoes. “If our agenda is not inclusive in terms of what we support at the grassroots levels of women, we are not going to carry you,” she stressed. She sounded the caution at the start of a three-day Feminist Agenda Setting meeting funded by Urgent Action Fund Africa held at a local hotel in Monrovia. Solanke said she expects that after the workshop participants will return to their respective communities and sensitize other women on the matter. According to her, women will continue to push local actors and make them knowledgeable of the need to continuously protect women, even after the presidential tenure of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. “She has played her part and is about to leave; so the…

A Chinese court has convicted American businesswoman Sandy Phan-Gillis for spying and ordered her deportation. Phan-Gillis was sentenced to three and a half years in prison by a court in Nanning, but it is unclear if she will have to serve the time. She was arrested in March 2015 while travelling with a business delegation from Texas through mainland China. She has already spent more than two years in detention and her family has consistently maintained her innocence. Phan-Gillis, who has Chinese origins but was born in Vietnam, was accused of espionage and stealing state secrets, according to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Her lawyer, Shang Baojun, told the AFP news agency that he expected she would be “deported very soon”, which would mean she would not have to serve the sentence. The 57-year-old business consultant, who lives with her family in Houston, Texas, was in “okay” condition,…

Saudi Arabia, a country where women are not allowed to drive cars, has been elected to the United Nations women’s rights commission, sparking anger. The kingdom was elected recently by secret ballot to a four-year term on the Commission on the Status of Women and will join 45 other countries on the panel, a UN press statement said. The commission’s role has been to “promote shaping global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women”. Algeria and Iraq were also elected to join the commission along with ten other countries. Under the kingdom’s conservative interpretation of Islamic law, women face many restrictions in work and travel. UN Watch, a monitoring group, has harshly criticized the UN for allowing Saudi Arabia onto the commission. “Electing Saudi Arabia to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” said Hillel Neuer, Executive director of the watchdog. “It’s…