RIGHTS OF WOMEN AND GIRLS Women and girls across the region continued to be subjected to a wide range of violations and abuses, including gender-based violence and discrimination and violations of sexual and reproductive rights. VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS Violence against women and girls remained prevalent. Impunity for crimes such as rape, killings and threats was widespread and entrenched, often underpinned by weak political will, limited resources to investigate and bring perpetrators to justice, and an unchallenged patriarchal culture. Ongoing gender-based violence in the Dominican Republic resulted in an increase in the number of killings of women and girls. Gender-based violence against women and girls was also a major concern in Mexico and worsened in Nicaragua. In Jamaica, women’s movements and survivors of gender-based and sexual violence took to the streets to protest against impunity for such crimes. There was an increase in the number of killings of women in leadership roles in Colombia, and no clear progress in ensuring access to justice for women survivors of sexual violence. However, women’s organizations ensured that the Peace Agreement established that people suspected of having committed crimes of sexual violence would be required to appear before transitional justice tribunals. In Cuba, The Ladies in White – a group of female relatives of prisoners detained on politically motivated grounds – remained a key target of repression by the authorities. Canada’s federal government released a strategy to combat gender-based violence, and committed to placing women’s rights, gender equality and sexual and reproductive rights at the core of its foreign policy. A law to combat violence against women entered into force in Paraguay in December, although it remained unclear how it would be funded. SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS THE USA’S “GLOBAL GAG RULE” In January, two days after massive worldwide demonstrations for equality and against discrimination, US President Trump put at risk the lives and health of millions of women and girls around the world by reinstating the so-called “global gag rule”. This blocked US financial assistance to any hospitals or organizations that provide abortion information about, or access to, safe and legal abortion care, or that advocate the decriminalization of abortion or the expansion of abortion services. In Latin America alone – where experts estimate that 760,000 women are treated annually from complications of unsafe abortion – President Trump’s stance put many more lives at risk. CRIMINALIZATION OF ABORTION A ruling by Chile’s Constitutional Tribunal to support the decriminalization of abortion in certain cases left just seven countries worldwide persisting with a total ban on abortion, even when the life or health of the woman or girl is at risk. Six of those countries were in the Americas region: the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and Suriname. In El Salvador, 19-year-old Evelyn Beatriz Hernández Cruz was jailed for 30 years on charges of aggravated homicide, after suffering obstetric complications resulting in a miscarriage. In December, a court confirmed the 30-year sentence of Teodora, a woman who suffered a stillbirth in 2007. 34 Amnesty International Report 2017/18