Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has announced an inquiry into why nearly 1,200 indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing over decades.
TW for violence against women, MMIW
“Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has announced an inquiry into why nearly 1,200 indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing over decades.
Their fate has been a festering wound in many of Canada’s 600 native communities, with allegations of mishandled murder investigations or failures to look into missing persons cases.
The previous Conservative administration had long resisted calls for an inquiry, seeing the disproportionate number of deaths and disappearances as resulting from domestic violence.
Native leaders and activists have been calling for an inquiry for more than a decade, since dozens of prostitutes went missing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and were later determined to have been victims of a serial killer.
A 2014 report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police identified 1,181 murdered or missing aboriginal women dating back to 1952.
Minister of status of women Patty Hajdu said she wanted to understand “the conditions that create such an imbalance and make indigenous women and children or … young girls that much more at risk than the average Canadian woman”.
In addition to ordering the inquiry, Mr Trudeau vowed to make “significant investments” in native education and to lift a cap on federal funding for indigenous communities.
Furthermore, he said Canada would “fully implement” the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”
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