Women from minority and indigenous communities are targeted for rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and killings specifically because of their ethnic, religious or indigenous identity, Minority Rights Group International says in its 2011 annual report launched Tuesday.

Mr. Ban told a high-level forum on women and democracy, held in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, that it was time for “faster and wider progress” in promoting the participation of women at all levels of society.

The lingering effects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide continue to be felt among the country's children, particularly the one million orphans and vulnerable children living in the country.

While the 100-day killing spree that was the Rwandan genocide has been over for about seventeen years. The consequences of the ethnic violence in the spring of 1994 are still confronting children in Rwanda today.

"The soldiers were calling 'dinner, dinner, dinner'. And we women who were in the forest thought people were bringing dinner for them. It was not that.

The Fiji's Women's Rights Movement's (FWRM) retreat and planning at the Pearl Resort in Pacific Harbor was shut down by police. Two staff members were taken in for questioning. It was noted that another NGO was holding a strategic planning event at the same venue and this event was not interrupted or by the Police.

Korlu, a young mother of two, lives on the outskirts of Monrovia, the capital here.

A high school dropout, Korlu, who declined to give her last name for safety reasons, says when she was a teen, she became pregnant.

"My parents put me out of their house because they couldn't bear the shame of me getting pregnant," she says.

South Sudan should mark its independence on July 9, 2011, by taking key steps to further a robust human rights agenda, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said today. The steps should include placing a moratorium on the death penalty, releasing detainees whose continued imprisonment is unjustified, and ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Thursday, ENCISS, a Civil Society organization, and government were in a dialogue forum on women's participation in governance at the Atlantic Hall, National Stadium Hostel, in Freetown. The theme for the forum was ‘achieving a minimum 30% quota for women in all spheres of governance opportunities and challenges'.

When checking the nuclear ambitions of dictators or building “democracy” in Baghdad, politicians tend to justify foreign policy by touting America as an international “beacon” of freedom and equality. A new report on the world's five most dangerous countries for women is a predictable listing of places not yet reached by the light of America's democratic promise.

Women must not be sidelined by the new political systems being born from the Arab Spring, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a conference of democratic nations Friday.

"In the Middle East and North Africa, women have marched, blogged and put their lives on the line," Clinton said in a speech at a gathering of the Community of Democracies.