We've all faced situations that beg us to take a stand, to take a risk for a long range reward. World Pulse asked grassroots women leaders to write about their "Standing Up" moments. What emerged is a testament to the rising leadership of women across the world.
Every human being has certain indisputable rights that must be delivered in a way so that they have a positive effect on human lives enabling them to live better and more fulfilling lives.
The world is globalizing very rapidly and scientific innovations have emerged as a phenomenon for development.
Although the flow of information is increasing very rapidly, this change has affected a very small segment of the society.
Her laugh is infectious, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in a high school drama class or a Hollywood hair salon. But this is the Arab world, not Tinseltown. And Miriem Bensalah Chaqroun is no lightweight.
She leads Morocco’s General Confederation of Moroccan Enterprises (CGEM), a giant trade association roughly analogous to the U.S. chamber of Commerce.
Bensalah is also a licensed pilot, a Harley-Davidson rider, a race car driver, a competitive golfer — and a 49-year-old mother of three.
Tunisia has always led gender equality in the Middle East for the past fifty years, with women playing an active role in civil society and enjoying the same legal rights as men. Now, with the old regime overthrown this past spring, many Tunisians are concerned that Al-Nahda, a more conservative Islamic party, will come to power and pull the nation back into the past.
Layla’s life is still in danger. We need you to take action to save her.
Layla Ibrahim Issa is a 23-year old mother who was sentenced to death by stoning by the Mayo court in Khartoum, Sudan. We put out an action alert to support Layla earlier this month, and we extend our thanks to those of you who raised their voices; but Layla is still in prison with her 6-month old child.
The authorities have not yet responded to our demands to immediately repeal the verdict, and stop the planned execution.
Some Syrian refugees arriving in Jordan are opting to marry off their daughters at a young age believing that marital status offers a form of protection and insurance.
"In Maraq, we have come across around 50 cases of early marriages since the day we started helping out Syrians. Most of them are married to Syrians, especially cousins," said Khaled Ghanem, from the Islamic Society Centre (ISC).
A young Turkish woman, now resident in Canada, travels to Turkey in an attempt to unravel the story behind her aunt Guzide's murder, some 30 years earlier in a remote Kurdish village.
As she searches for clues and closure, she encounters antiquated customs in a Kurdish culture she has never known. She knows that her aunt was a victim of a senseless vendetta killing and as she ventures from village to village she pieces together the woman's final days and closes in on the identity of her killer.
Dhenkanal/ Odisha, 15 February, 2012: Bharati Behra has great apirations for her people. As a recently elected Sarpanch or village head, she hopes to become the voice of tribals from the area. “I want to make the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act easier for women to access,” she says. The Act guarantees paid employment for a minimum of 100 days in rural India.
Elected from Kankadpal during panchayat or village council elections in Odisha state of India, Bharati’s victory is a trimuph for the tribal women of her region.
Merna Thomas, a twenty-four-year-old activist, heads out for another day of revolution. Armed with brushes and small buckets of paint, her goal today is not the overthrow of a regime, but something perhaps even more daring: to change Egyptian attitudes toward women. On the side of a downtown building, she puts her graffiti skills to work with an illustration of Samira Ibrahim—hailed for bravely speaking out after becoming one of the victims of the infamous virginity tests that Egyptian security forces performed on detained female protesters in 2011. Passersby mumble streams of complaints.
Afghanistan has one of the lowest consumption rates of electricity per person worldwide. To the outsider, this statistic may represent nothing more than the inevitable result of stalled reconstruction efforts or the mismanagement of funds. Yet to the people of rural Afghanistan, the lack of such a necessity manifests in a number of daily struggles.
Terrorists will stop at nothing to keep Afghan girls from receiving an education.
"People are crazy," said Razia Jan, founder of a girls' school outside Kabul. "The day we opened the school, (on) the other side of town, they threw hand grenades in a girls' school, and 100 girls were killed.
An annual test of wills between Iran’s morality police and women who dress in ways that are deemed unacceptable has begun in cities across the Islamic republic.
But this year, the stakes are unusually high. As Iranian leaders attempt to deflect the public’s attention from economic woes spurred by crushing foreign sanctions, they risk alienating large segments of a society that is already deeply divided.
Poland's Bishops' Conference has denounced a Council of Europe convention aimed at prohibiting violence against women and urged the country's liberal government not to sign it.
"This convention is built on untruthful ideological assumptions," the bishops said in a declaration on Monday. "It mixes the proper principle of anti-violence with an attempt to interfere dangerously and suggests violence towards women is systemic and has roots in religion and culture. Polish law has enough tools for resisting instances of violence, including aggression towards women."
Nobody will ever know if Jhon Jairo Echenique decided to take his own life out of remorse, fear or mental illness. But the suicide followed his arrest for the stabbing and burning with acid of his 19-year-old former girlfriend Angélica Gutiérrez.
A law student, Gutiérrez was attacked at home. Neighbours took her to hospital where she died. Echenique, the prime suspect, was arrested in the Caribbean city of Cartagena de Indias in northern Colombia. Hours later, he used his shirt to hang himself in his cell.
DAKAR, 12 juil (IPS) - Au Sénégal, les femmes représentent 43,33 pour cent des 150 députés élus aux dernières élections législatives du 1er juillet, un record historique dû à la Loi sur la parité votée en 2010. Mais, la percée des femmes relance le débat sur la qualité du travail parlementaire.
Beating drums and blowing whistles, hundreds of women marched last month on Istanbul's central Taksim Square, in one of dozens of rallies that have been held around the country to protest a new threat to reproductive rights.
ISLAMABAD: Despite hard work on the part of numerous legislators and human rights activists, a steady number of ‘honour killing’ cases continue to be reported.
Earlier the killings were mostly isolated to northern Sindh, southern Punjab and some parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, but now the capital police are registering cases regularly especially in its rural areas.
اگرچه این روزها بحث مخالفت با حجاب اجباری در فضای مجازی داغ است و کمپینهای مختلف سایبری با انتشار عکسها، مصاحبه ها و شرح احوالات زنان و مردان ایرانی در خصوص حجاب اجباری سعی در نقد و اعتراض به سیاستهای ۳۳ساله جمهوری اسلامی در خصوص تحمیل یک نوع پوشش خاص و متحد الشکل به زنان ایرانی دارند. ولی بحث حجاب اگر از منظر بین المللی آن نیز مورد توجه قرار گیرد شاید برخورد با مسئله حجاب و اعتراض به اجباری بودن آن را قابل تاملتر کند.
Depriving women of their basic rights is not a new subject. But when these rights are ignored by social activists in the name of culture or religion we must be alarmed. Now is the time to stop justifying mandatory hijab in the name of religion, nation, country, or culture. It is time to remind ourselves, as women and human rights activists, that when it comes to women's rights, there is no room for appeasement.
Just over a decade ago, in January 2002, the world came together in Tokyo in the wake of the fall of the Taliban regime to pledge our common support for political, economic and social transition in Afghanistan.
We were well aware of the long-term nature of the commitment we were making, in line with the ancient Afghan proverb, "One flower will not make a spring."
When Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin spearheaded the first modern Olympics in 1896, he excluded female competitors, saying it would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and incorrect.’’
It may have taken 116 years, but every nation participating in this year’s Olympics has offered a direct rebuttal to that antiquated opinion. “The Year of the Women’’ may be upon us in London.
As more than 22,000 people gathered at the XIX International AIDS Conference (IAC) this week in Washington D.C., UN Women convened a dialogue “Women Leading, Organizing and Inspiring Change in the AIDS Response,” among eight transformative leaders. Representing government, national AIDS coordinating authorities, women living with HIV, and caregiver alliances, panelists shared experiences from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean on how to ensure meaningful participation of women at all levels of the AIDS response.
Some 2,000 years ago, during the Nubian period, North Sudan was ruled by women, including Queen Kandaka, famous for her strength. Today, a new generation of Kandakas is taking back the streets and fighting at the frontline of the revolution.
In Jordan and Lebanon, women married to foreigners are taking to the streets to fight for their children's citizenship rights.
In both countries, women who marry non-nationals are unable to confer nationality on their child or spouse, rendering their families foreigners in the eyes of the law, and denying them rights and access to key public services. In contrast, men from those countries who marry foreigners face no such obstacles.
There is an interesting new finding out from the Economist Intelligence Unit. In a report on global food security, the EIU found that there is a strong correlation (.93) between women’s economic empowerment and the security of a country’s food supply.
In an ashram perched high on a hill above the noisy city of Guwahati in north-east India is a small exhibit commemorating the life of India's most famous son. Alongside an uncomfortable-looking divan where Mahatma Gandhi once slept is a display reminding visitors of something the man himself said in 1921: "Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex (not the weaker sex)."
تدين منظمة العفو الدولية الحكم بالرجم حتى الموت الذي صدر بحق ليلى إبراهيم عيسى جمول، وتدعو الحكومة السودانية إلى وقف تنفيذ الحكم وإصلاح قانونها الجنائي بلا تأخير، بهدف إلغاء عقوبة الإعدام إلغاءً تاماً.
Amnesty International condemns the sentencing of Layla Ibrahim Issa Jumul to death by stoning and calls on the Sudanese government to halt the execution and to reform its criminal law without delay, with the aim to abolish corporal punishment.
Layla Ibrahim Issa Jumul, a 23-year old Sudanese woman, was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery on 10 July 2012 by the Criminal Court of Mayo, in Khartoum, under Article 146 of Sudan’s 1991 Criminal Code.
