Profile:
Linda wrote her LL.B. thesis at the University of Namibia on Policies and Legislation on HIV/AIDS in Namibia: A Human Rights Based Approach? After graduation, Ms. Dumba conducted research for the Law Reform and Development Commission of the Ministry of Justice in Namibia on the impact of traditional inheritance laws on women and children in 2003. She also conducted research for UNICEF on the plight of orphans in rural communities, including those affected by HIV/AIDS. She was engaged as a candidate legal practitioner at the Human Rights and Constitutional Litigation Unit of the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC), the only public interest law firm in Namibia. Through LAC’s Women and Property Rights Project, Linda represented widows and child victims of “property grabbing” (disinheritance). She led a forum on women’s rights under customary law in Zambia, resulting in a report on that issue in Namibia, South Africa and Zambia. Linda helped enact a statute replacing discriminatory provisions of the law governing black decedents’ estates in Namibia, and participated in a conference in South Africa on Strategic Litigation for Women’s Rights. Through her church, Linda led talks on women’s property rights and HIV/AIDS.
In 2004, she was admitted as a legal practitioner to the High Court of Namibia and was incorporated into the LAC’s Land, Environment and Development Department. In this capacity, she has worked on the Women and Property Rights Project, conducting educational workshops with women’s groups, communal land farmers, community activists, traditional leaders, communal land boards, churches, and government officials on laws relating to women’s rights to property. During this time, she facilitated a workshop on women’s rights under customary law held in Lusaka, Zambia, a joint project between the Legal Resources Foundation in South Africa, the Legal Resources Foundation in Zambia and the Legal Assistance Centre in Namibia, which culminated in a report on the position of women under customary law in those countries
Ms. Dumba contributed to the Estates and Succession Amendment Act 15 of 2005, which replaced discriminatory provisions of the Native Administrative Proclamation 15 of 1928, dealing with the administration and distribution of black decedents’ estates. On International Women’s Rights Day 2005, she presented the civil society statement to the African Ministerial Conference on Hydro Power and Sustainable Development in South Africa.
During her LAWA Fellowship, Linda completed her thesis on “Using International Human Rights Instruments to Realize Women's Property and Inheritance Rights in the context of HIV/AIDS in Namibia.” After completing her L.L.M. at Georgetown, she interned at the Center for International Environment Law, where she was awarded a Louis Sohn Fellowship. She conducted research for the International Financial Institutions and Gender Programs, which support local communities concerned about projects financed by the World Bank and export credit agencies. She also worked on CIEL’s Democratizing International Dispute Settlement initiative, developing and applying a systematic analytic framework for evaluating the need to increase transparency, public participation and accountability. Linda also participated in numerous speaking engagements on women’s rights, including a presentation for an Americans for Informed Democracy forum and for Constella Futures.
After this, she returned to Namibia and began work as the project lawyer for the Aids Law Unit of LAC in Windhoek, Namibia. Examples of cases taken up by the Legal Assistance Centre include:
- the forced sterilization of HIV positive women in public hospitals without their informed consent,
- the right of a student to return to school after her child was born,
- the right of an accused in a complicated criminal trial to obtain legal aid,
- the right of a widow to keep the land she lived on during her marriage after the death of her husband,
- the right of an HIV-positive person not to be dismissed from employment based on their HIV status.
Linda recently sent the LAWA Program this update on her important work against forced sterilization of women:
The focus of the AIDS Law Unit is on the infringement of civil and political rights on the basis of HIV status, and the denial of socio-economic rights which both increases vulnerability to HIV and impacts negatively on health outcomes. Discrimination and other HIV and AIDS rights issues are addressed on a number of levels and by various means, including policy formulation and research for law reform, litigation, advocacy, education and training, networking, publishing and provision of basic client services of such as legal advice and referral. In February 2008, the Aids Law Unit established the Forced Sterilization of HIV Positive Women in Namibia Project. The project was conceived out of a number of complaints received from HIV positive women alleging that they were forcibly sterilized at public hospitals in Namibia due to their HIV positive status. To date the LAC has documented twenty such cases.
The forced sterilization of HIV positive women in Namibia is an emerging human rights issue, the extent of which is yet to be discovered in Namibia and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Namibia has thirteen regions, and the twenty cases documented thus far are only from two regions within the country. There is a clear need to conduct further research on the issue to document the extent of the violations. Apart from the ongoing litigation, the ALU has also designed a training manual on the issue. The purpose of the manual is to train women who are the victims of this practice and the medical professionals who are the perpetrators of this practice in both the private and public health care sectors on the sexual and reproductive health rights of their patients, to empower women on their rights and to create awareness on this gross violation of women's human rights.
I am directly responsible for the Forced Sterilization of HIV positive women in Namibia Litigation Project. Namibia is the first country to document this practice in Africa. This is one of our youngest and latest projects, which has received a lot of press in recent months, particularly at the most recently held Southern African Legal Assistance Network (SALAN) 15th Year Anniversary Celebrations which were held in Windhoek, Namibia and hosted by my organization from May 24 - 28. This is also one of the new projects that were adopted at the SALAN meeting. The idea is to source funding to conduct a nationwide research on the issue in Namibia, which research will then be duplicated in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. We have also made a submission to the Government of the Republic of Namibia, through the Minister of Health and Social Services, detailing the issue and asking for a meeting and for specific steps that the government should take.
In 2010, Linda and LAC partnered with Georgetown Law’s International Women’s Human Rights Clinic (IWHRC) and IWHRC teaching fellow Aram Schvey (2008-2009, U.S.) to complete a fact-finding mission, report, and draft legislation addressing Namibia’s customary marriage and inheritance laws. The team explored the interaction between these laws and the HIV epidemic in Namibia. On another note, Linda’s graduate research paper on “Using International Human Rights Instruments to Realize Women's Property and Inheritance Rights in the context of HIV/AIDS in Namibia,” which she wrote during her LAWA Fellowship, served as a valuable resource for the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law’s project to develop a health and human rights database focusing on legal decisions from around the world.
|
