The full account of this year’s lengthy deliberation and vote taking can be found in our Feminine-Perspective Magazine.
Rest in peace, and with our love, Shero Shireen Abu Akleh.
Godspeed to sheroes Tsai Ing-wen & Leila De Lima. Your road ahead has bumps, but we, your sisters, are with you.
By Geraldine Frisque, The RINJ Foundation
Artwork/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective-Magazine
Every year, the RINJ Women on our Board of Directors and in a select committee choose from the advice of hundreds of RINJ members the candidates for the year. Katie Alsop, our global executive director, sums up very well the emotions felt during a very tough year. Good riddance to 2022.
“In 2022, these are the toughest women for whom we acknowledged our love, most often, and most intensely,” said Katie Alsop, executive director of the global women’s rights organization, RINJ Women.
Our 2022 Sheroes are very tough women:
- The late Shireen Abu Akleh, member of the amazing Aljazeera family.
- Former Senator and professor Leila De Lima, a political prisoner in the Marcos/Duterte Republic of the Philippines since 2017; and
- the extraordinary President Tsai Ing-wen, leader of Taiwan.
Click image to watch the al Jazeera Fault Lines special broadcast of the investigation into The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh.
“This Shero ensures Taiwan’s future of innovation, opportunity and safety of children and their families,” says a feminist defender of human rights, Katie Alsop. Photo Credit: Youtube. SCMP (Watch) Photo Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
“Tsai Ing-wen is a Shero for proving the world needs female leadership in order to keep the peace,” explains Ms. Alsop.
Caught between the Americans and the People’s Republic of China, Tsai Ing-wen is the elected leader of the Republic of China (ROC), better known on the American side as “Taiwan”.
“There must be days when Tsai Ing-wen has privately not been able to decide which of the two players on her opposite shoulders is friend or foe,” said Ms. Alsop who coordinated the two women teams doing the evaluations this year.
Senator Leila De Lima listens to a PNP-CIDG officer who served the warrant for her arrest at the Senate grounds in Pasay City Friday morning. 24 February 2017. Photo Credit Avito C. Dalan / PNA. Photo Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
Sadly, three of 2021’s hero women who smooth the path of humanity for a future of innovation, opportunity & the safety of children and their families, were held in prison or on bail by brutal authoritarian regimes.
Today that is still true for Professor Leila De Lima who has been a political prisoner since 24 February 2016, in the Philippines.
Being a Shero doesn’t mean walking a sheltered pathway through life.
And worse, one of our Sheroes was murdered by a state government, Israel, on 11 May 2022. The world is not over that assassination. This crime will go before the International Criminal Court which has yet to decide if it will conduct an investigation.
The full account of the 2022 Sheroes deliberation and vote taking can be found in our Feminine-Perspective Magazine.
Happy New Year, sisters. God bless you and keep you safe.
Geraldine
