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CONTENTS PagesExecutiveCommitteeMembers2013 3AcknowledgementandAppreciation 3 AnnualReport2013 Introduction 4 Programmes

1 Women’sPoliticalParticipation 5

2 Advocacy&Outreach 7

3 Networking 9

4 OperationsandStaff 11

5 FinancialReport 11

6 Conclusion 12

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ANNUALREPORT2013EXECUTIVECOMMITTEEMEMBERS2013PERSATUANKESEDARANKOMUNITISELANGOR(PKKS-EMPOWER)

President: GopalanPapachanVice-President: PookLiYoonTreasurer: TanJuanSengAlvinSecretary: NazreenNizamCommitteeMembers: NoelDass ThencyGunasekaran LauShuShi

APPRECIATIONANDGRATITUDEWarmest thanks to all our members, volunteers and friends who havecontributedtowardsmakingPersatuanKesedaranKomunitiSelangorwhatitistoday.Yourencouragement,generosityandcommitmenthavegivenusallhopethatwewillmakethetransformationalchangefordemocracy.

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Introduction

Warmest wishes to all! We are now five years old since our registration in 2008 and it is definitely a year for celebration. We came out from a year where we have made a difference.

Over the years we have always upheld our commitment to empower and restore justice to the marginalised, discriminated and oppressed. This meant defending and equipping those who are unable to defend themselves or to speak up. As expressed in our vision and mission: we envision a society where there is equality and a thriving democracy that respects diversity. And, to carry our vision forward, we intend to initiate, promote and support exchanges and actions that relate to justice and democracy and based on feminist and human rights principles. We will support, cooperate and empower communities, especially women and the youth, empowering them to realise their own potential.

To realise our mission, we have focussed specifically on building women leaders at community and national levels. We felt that the voices and actions from community women, especially those who have less access to information and resources, need our support most. In the hope that we will contribute towards realizing 30% women’s political participation, we trained 618 women, of which two were elected into Parliament: Alice Lau Kiong Yieng (Lanang) and Kasthuri Patto (Batu Kawan). Three other of our participants were elected into State Assemblies: Tiew Way Keng (Teratai), Wong Shu Qi (Senai), and Kamache Doray Rajoo (Sabai). Another three women were appointed as local councilors: Wasanthee Shanti, Sarimah Lisut, and Ruthira Surasan. We are indeed proud very proud of them.

The year 2013 also saw us making long-term engagement with communities that we work with. Together with women leaders, we have helped set up their Wanita Biro at Subang Parliament and made a three year commitment to build women’s leadership. We have engaged with indigenous women leaders and will be helping them to build leaders who will be able to take up decision making positions. And, to cap it all EMPOWER’s Tanpa Wajah, a short documentary on women leaders, won the best Malaysian Film Award with a RM5000 as prize money!

Our commitment to free and fair elections for all is expressed in BERSIH 2.0’s (Coalition for Free and Fair Elections) successfully mobilization of voters through our JOM 100 campaign. This successfully contributed to the 84% voters’ turnout, the highest voters’ turnout in the history of Malaysia. BERSIH 2.0 also mobilised 3000 strong PEMANTAU observers who came from all over Malaysia to observe the 13th. General Elections. Its campaign eventually extended to include monitoring political violence in elections and giving a strong recommendation to the Election Commission on the Code of Conduct of Candidates as well as Guidelines for Caretaker Government. None of the recommendations were taken up by the Election Commission. However, it did not stop BERSIH 2.0 because through its campaign it raised awareness among Malaysians that their votes count if they come out to vote in numbers.

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Internationally, we have made strategic interventions at the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and also help popularised COMANGO and its human rights recommendations.

So it has been a very eventful 2013 and we present to you EMPOWER’s programmes with a punch!

Programmes

Women’s Political Participation

This training programme aims to increase women candidates and to strengthen women leaders and potential candidates with a gender perspective so that they can better advocate for women’s issues and concerns. We have held six training workshops with different constituencies to strengthen new/existing MPs and ADUN capabilities competencies. For all training regarding WPP, please refer to appendix 1

Table 1: Mentoring of Existing Women Leaders

Candidate Current position Suggest future position Current project Wasanthee Local councilor IWD 2014 Arulselvi Local councilor IWD 2014 Aiman Athirah Candidate MP Provide training and input

from time to time Sarimah Lisut Local councillor State Representative Need to develop working

relationship Dr.Daroyah State

Representative/State Exco on Health

Member of Parliament Need to develop working relationship

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Kamache Doray Rajoo

State Representative - Sabai

State Representative/Woman Leader in Party

Need to develop working relationship

Tiew Way Keng

State representative of Teratai

Member of Parliament IWD 2014 Attended training at Bali 27 – 28 Feb 2014

Kasturi Patto Member of Parliament of Batu Kawan

Member of Parliament/Woman Leader in Party

Attended training at Bali 27 – 28 Feb 2014

Nurul Shuhadah

Candidate - Penggerang

State Representative Need to develop working relationship

Vijayarany Community Leader Local Councillor Need to develop working relationship

Ruthira Surasan

Local Councillor Local Councillor Need to develop working relationship

Atie PA Member of Parliament Subang

Local Councillor IWD 2014 Attended training at Bali 27 – 28 Feb 2014

Alice Lau MP for Lanang Need to develop working relationship, however distance is a consideration

Wong Shu Qi State Assembly person for Senai

Need to develop working relationship, however distance is a consideration

Chua Yee Ling State Assembly person for Kuala Sepetang

Need to develop working relationship, however distance is a consideration

Gan Pei Nei State Assembly person for Rawang

Need to develop working relationship, however distance is a consideration

There remains many challenges for our women’s political participation programme. These include the following concerns that need to be resolved:

i. Late nominations have limited the ability to provide candidates with full support ii. Insufficient time and resources to prepare as well as short and fast learning curve for

potential candidates makes campaigning less effective iii. There is a need to negotiate with political parties to increase women candidates on

their party’s nomination list iv. There is still a tendency for women to contest against one another and this becomes

obstacles to having more women elected at state as well as parliament levels.

However, there were some achievements that we could learn from and they are as follows:

v. Education tools helped to motivate women to exert political and activist leadership and to encourage more women to vote.

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vi. Conducted, taped and uploaded (youtube: empower05) a series of interviews with party leaders on their position on women’s political participation. This gave encouragement to the women candidates who stood for the elections.

vii. Conducted, taped and uploaded (youtube:empower05 and facebook) a campaign by MPs, ADUN, and community leaders to encourage women to vote and support women candidates

viii. As part of voters’ education, EMPOWER with the help of interns from ACT College produced and uploaded “Undi Kita, Hak Kita” Tamil language video on how to vote with the collaboration of Kuala Selangor community and interns (youtube: empower05)

ix. An interactive map Equality Under Construction showing MP candidates’ gender, political party, and incumbency and constituency characteristics (number of voters, closeness of GE12, ethnic make up). This helped to track the achivements of women candidates.

x. EMPOWER wrote and produced “Tanpa Wajah”, a short video documentary on three women’s journey on participates on political decision-making and their struggle. Tanpa Wajah, to our joy, won Best Malaysian Film Freedom Film Festival 2013

Other videos produced to promote women’s participation include: i. Youtube views of party leader interviews: Total 346 views; view of individual uploads

ranged between 28 and 91 ii. Youtube views of “My message,“ Kata Kata Semangat” and “Message for Women”:

Total views 2797 view of individual uploads ranged from 19 to 1363 iii. Youtube views of “Undi Kita, Hak Kita”

Monitoring women’s 30% political participation in decision making was carried out. Some of the activities include:

i. Creation of a MP interactive map identify MPs gender, political party, tenure as a MP, government leadership position, national political party leadership (women only), year of birth for GE12 and GE13 (http://euc.empowermalaysia.org/

ii. Creation of ADUN interactive map identifying ADUN by gender and political party for GE13 (under construction)

iii. Monitoring questions asked by women MPs and analysing by political coalition, Penisular or East Malaysia MP, and constituency interested (http://euc.empowermalaysia.org/blog/2014/01/20/empower-reports-women-malaysias-parliament/)

Some of our challenges were as follows:

i. Insufficient staff time to review, upload, and disseminate reports ii. AreReliance on volunteers and interns to update maps and to develop maps on

women’s participation in local government

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Advocacy and Outreach

• Public Education

Together with the Selangor State government, EMPOWER ran two half-day workshops on 16 November 2013 on Gender Advocacy in Subang. A total of 80 women attended and they came from communities in Selangor and some were key leaders at the local councils. YB Rodziah Ismail was present to give a keynote address to the participants. The workshops were a booster as it encouraged some women to come forward to say, “I learned a lot and I like you to come to my community to repeat the same training”; “I didn’t know what was gender and now I know”; and “When is the next training?”

As a follow-up, we held a discussion with women leaders from Subang Parliament and together we formed “Biro Latihan Wanita, Subang” with seven women heading the committee. As most of the women at Subang raised to EMPOWER’s trainers, they felt that they lack leadership and organizational skills to organize communities. In engaging with the women, EMPOWER will be able to raise their awareness on women’s rights as well as their organizational skills.

• Working with Indigenous Women Leaders

In addition to our WPP programme, we held a dialogue on 14 December 2013 with key indigenous women leaders in Peninsular Malaysia and made a decision to have capacity building workshops for indigenous women in Selangor and Perak. While no training was held in 2013 there were dates fixed to have workshops in 2014. The purpose of the training was to build the leadership of indigenous women so that some of them can be leaders at their communities as well as consider their names for appointment as councilors.

• International Women’s Day 2013

We did not organize any events in 2013 for IWD but we produced short video clips of women political parties leaders. Their stories were uploaded onto YouTube as well as Empower’s facebook.

• BERSIH 2.0

BERSIH 2.0 has consistenly and systematically continued to push for electoral reforms. A series of public education took place in 2013 and they covered both Peninsular Malaysia as well as Sabah and Sarawak. JOM 100 campaign to encourage more voters’ turnout was successful and its achievement was witness by the high turnout at 13th. General Elections on 5 May 2013 – 83% was the highest in our Malaysian history. Another success of BERSIH 2.0 was the 3000 strong PEMANTAU election observers which help to monitor fraud and was impactful as it highlight the failure of the indelible ink at the national level. Subsequently because there were sufficient PEMANTAU in most states, BERSIH 2.0 believed

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that it had contributed to a reduction in fraud on polling day. This was subsequently reiterated at BERSIH 2.0’s People’s Tribunal where numerous voters, candidates and elected representatives came forward to give their testimonies of violations that took place at 13 th. General Elections.

BERSIH 2.0 has definitely kept to its agenda to advocate for electoral reforms in Malaysia and the publicity that it generate had brought the issues to the national level and in many ways forced the nation to take electoral rights, integrity, and transparency more seriously.

Networking

National

EMPOWER worked closely with local Malaysian groups, such as the Joint Action Group for Gender Equality (JAG) and women Parliamentarians. It was part of the lobbying group to advocate for amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code on domestic violence and continued to raise strong objections to Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012 , which was passed on 17 April 2012.

Together with Mama BERSIH, EMPOWER supported their launch of the eight demands on 15 April 2013. They included eliminating of all laws that discriminate against women, reforming all repressive laws, including setting up an Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC), to review all laws related to the police force, and also reform of the education policy in Malaysia. It also looked into health, where privatisation of health services has resulted in some women not being able to have access to health services, because of high medical costs.

A lot more intimidation from fundamentalist group, especially on SIS, most of their work unable to be recognise. Abuses still the main priority of most organisation within JAG coalition. New resources that developed were one new training module “The Diversity and Human Rights” by AWAM and a book “Access to Justice for VAW Survivors” by WCC. Campaign launched were Tenaganita - Domestic workers campaign in Penang and “No excuse for abuse” by WAO. Aiyoh Wat Lah won the GenTruth award, for courage in shedding light on new or growing forms of gender discrimination.

The latest development on Law Reform began when the Prevention of Crime (Amendments and Extensions) Act 1959 (POCA) and corresponding amendments to the Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code on domestic violence was tabled during the 2nd Parliamentary Sitting in 2013. The AGC’s research unit was to conduct research on the topics arose in the proposal but had yet to submit any feedback or findings. During the meetings, the AG refused to discuss on IFL. He was adamant that he already had consulted with the experts in Sharia’ laws and it will be tabled in Parliament.

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Attack on Human Rights Defenders and silencing progressive voices also a concern as most of JAG member play an active role in COMANGO.

International

EMPOWER continues to share the secretariat jointly with SUARAM for COMANGO and submitted key interventions at the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The key responsibility is to collate and write the NGO joint report, which evaluates the progress of human rights in Malaysia. This started a chain reaction from some Muslim NGOs who perceived the COMANGO report as being anti-Islam and pro-LGBT. However, COMANGO, including EMPOWER, remains resolute that the recommendations are far from all the accusations made against it. The report had categorically been firm on human rights and had reported them fairly and accurately with the intention to highlight violations that have remained unresolved since 2009.

Maria was invited to speak at the Bangkok ICIRD 2013 conference “Beyond Borders: Building a Regional Commons in Southeast Asia”, which was held on 22 August 2013. The paper presented was on, Making the vote count: Challenges of Electoral Integrity in Southeast Asia.

Shu Shi attended most of the programme which organise by Kemitraan, namely, Women Leadership Forum to Women Parliamentarian in Promoting Women’s Representation in Southeast Asia and was held from 1 to 2 March 2013. An interesting suggestion came from the meeting and that was to explore the possibility of forming a regional group to raise the discourse on women’s political participation. It was agreed that more work is needed to set up this informal regional group.

EMPOWER was invited to attend a Staff Exchange for Joint Research from 21 May 2013 – 25 May 2013, where staff were encouraged to give input into a research paper that was written by two researchers, commissioned by Kemitraan to evaluate partner organisations. Other meetings that were participated by EMPOWER include: • Seminar on the Country and Joint/Regional Researches on Promoting Women’s

Political Representation in Southeast Asia on 5 of June 2013. For Kemitraan to present their draft position paper.

• Advocacy Strategy Workshop 31 July – 2 August 2013. In this 2 days workshop, all organisation except Cambodia agreed to work on different topic and agreed to set up secretariat for WPP programme at regional level.

• Peer to Peer Dialogue/Discussion of Position Paper on Women’s Political Representation in Five Southeast Asian Countries 9 – 10 December 2013, in this workshop the position paper were discussed. Maria attended the meeting to discuss setting up the regional secretariat, however there is no progress after the previous discussion.

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• Nazreen Nizam and Lau Shu Shi attended a social media workshop organized by The International Republican Institute on 21 and 22 of September in Bangkok. The workshop was on how to leverage the social media and constituent relationship management in order to enhance the organisation’s advocacy campaign.

Operations and Staff

We welcomed Yasmin Masidi as the Media person and Adam Adli as a contract staff for Bersih, and Siti Nor as the Finance and Administration Officer, Unfortunately, Asha and Deepa left us although Deepa continued part-time on the IKAT project. In 2013, the bulk of the programmes were shouldered by Shu Shi, aided by very dedicated and capable volunteers.

Four students from The One Academy interned with us for six weeks and helped revamp the EMPOWER leaflet. The result is a folded silhouette of a woman’s face which opens up into an image of a tree, with its fruits depicting the results of equality, justice and non-discrimination, the principles of CEDAW.

With the hire of a part-time Financial Consultant, the organizational finances, payroll, EA forms are well on the way to being computerized and organized. No more writing of payment vouchers and punching the calculators; excel sheets are the way to go!

Funders, particularly Kemitraan, organized a number of programmes which both staff and members attended as part of the staff development programme. Refer to the pages above for a narrative of the programmes.

EMPOWER organized fund raising selling Samad Said’s paintings and his book of poems, “Di Atas Padang Sejarah”. Despite the valiant efforts of staff, volunteers and well-wishes, we did not raise enough to recuperate the expenses ! Perhaps 2014 might be kinder to us.

FINANCIAL REPORT 2013

Total income of RM1,126,399 was received, mainly comprising grants, trainers’ fees, consultancies (RM432,227) and donations (RM666,609). The bulk of the donations were for BERSIH 2.0’s activities (RM664,269). Fixed assets were depreciated accordingly and are now worth RM12,751. There is a retained surplus of RM310,714 to be carried forward to 2012 and these will go to finance institutional costs like salaries, rent, utilities and staff medical insurance as many funders do not fund these costs. The funds will also be used in the Gender Advocacy and networking programmes since some parts of the programme are not funded at the present moment.

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Conclusion

We have moved forward and have made many gains in the process. Our strongest programme, increasing women’s leadership finally sown fruits as we witness women whom we trained bravely took up the challenges and stood as candidates.

Indeed, the work of EMPOWER will continue and we believe that it will move to greater heights with the strong support from members as well as volunteers.