As the long-awaited London Conference on Afghanistan lies just a day away, female Afghan human rights defenders, deeply troubled with the exclusion of Afghan women’s perspectives in the peace-building process, released a statement of detailed recommendations regarding their country’s security, development, and governance.
In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director of international women’s rights organization Equality Now, wrote a powerful article: she reminds readers that gender issues, and the plight unique to the women in Haiti, must be a central component in the response and management of relief and recovery operations. She exposes the terrible extent of women’s silent suffering prior to the disaster, and warns that following the earthquake, they are left disarmed, weakened, and even more vulnerable to violence and injustice.
UNIFEM announced yesterday the launching of a month-long online discussion forum on “Women in Power and Decision Making.” This is just one segment four-month series of United Nations online discussions organized and hosted by WomenWatch. This series was launched as a central component of the fifteen-year review of the Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action in 1995.
Amy Goodman, renowned journalist and host of Democracy Now!, has reported the death of Myriam Merlet, Chief of Staff, Ministry of Women’s Affair’s in Haiti. Yesterday, Goodman reported the tragic news of Merlet’s death caused by last week’s earthquake. Merlet represented the strength of the women’s movement in Haiti and was a friend to so many women there. One of the great feminists of the country, she brought significant social change and drew much attention to the problems women face in Haiti.
Hundreds of women gathered in New Delhi last October to protest the government’s inaction towards the rights of single women, and to reject the widow’s standard “rehabilitation package” which often forces a woman into remarriage or moves her to a shelter home. The campaign consists of two central goals: changing the societal views and beliefs that are a key contributing factor to the marginalization of single women, and lobbying at a national level for the acquisition of federal resources to strengthen and broaden their efforts.
In the final months of 2009, Uganda’s parliament passed two monumental bills that prohibit domestic violence and female genital mutilation. Under the new bill, slotted to pass by the end of this January, women will have the right to divorce her husband in circumstances of abuse and impotence.
