The Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies, a group founded in 2001, has been active on women's rights and sexuality despite increasingly constrained spaces and growing violence. In November it organized The international conference "Women, Sexual Rights and Reproductive Rights: Gains, freedoms and resistances" in Tunisia.

The Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR), a bi-regional solidarity network founded in 2001, works to promote sexual, reproductive and bodily rights on the national, regional and international levels. The organization started its newsletter which we attach here. Some of the articles in the newsletter are summarized below.

2006 has been a challenging, yet exciting year. In the first half of the year, our efforts were concentrated on the United Nations, with advocacy and lobbying at the High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS and the Commission on the Status of Women. Since 2004, CSBR has been actively partaking in UN processes, particularly pertaining to sexual, reproductive and bodily rights. The two main reasons for this are to challenge the conservative approach of most Muslim states, now strengthened by the alliance with other conservative forces like the USA and the Vatican in UN negotiations, and to render visible the efforts of activists in the region advocating for progressive social change in the domain of sexual health and rights on the international arena. To this end, in 2005, the Coalition decided to participate in the UNGASS meeting. We worked a part of the international COMPACT group advocating to prioritize sexual and reproductive rights in HIV/AIDS policy, programming and resource allocation. The delegation of the Coalition included 14 network representatives from Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Tunisia, and Turkey.

As we were preparing for the second half of the year, the attack on Lebanon in July 2006, brought all our plans to a halt, tightening the progressive spaces we have been striving to create in the Middle East yet once again. Still, towards the end of the year, we were able to hold the landmark “Women, Sexual Right and Reproductive Rights” meeting; the first ever sexual rights conference in Tunisia.

The meeting was organized and held under very constraining circumstances due to the immense state and police pressure and oppression in Tunisia, where no independent NGO had been allowed to organize a meeting for the past three years. ATFD was not able to confirm a venue for the meeting until only a few days before, since most hotels refused to provide a meeting space. Until the very last minute, we were expecting the police, who had the meeting venue under surveillance, to avert the meeting. Participants from Egypt and Jordan were refused visas, while a participant from Palestine was subject to Israeli police harassment at the airport and could not come. Despite all these obstacles, “Women, Sexual Rights and Reproductive Rights” was both a landmark for bringing issues of sexuality and sexual rights on the public agenda in Tunisia for the first time, and also a manifestation of ATFD’s determined efforts to promote rights and freedoms despite the trying circumstances.