After more than 10 years since it was passed, the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (Women, Peace and Security) is gaining more attention with the opportunity to develop and present a Regional Action Plan at the 2012 Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting.

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN) and Amman Center for Human Rights Studies (ACHRS) held a conference entitled “Towards a National Action Plan on Women's Rights: Implementation of Women's rights in the European Neighborhood Policy's Action Plan and the Istanbul–Marrakech Process” on March 14-15, 2011 in Amman. EMHRN's Director of the Women's Rights and Gender Equality Project Mrs.

A two-day OSCE training seminar for members of the Inter-Agency Working Group established by Kyrgyzstan to develop a national action plan on the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security ended today in Bishkek.

A few kilometres north of Kabul, a 22-year-old woman collapsed to the ground. The man with an AK-47 gun continued to shoot as the crowd in the background chanted, “Long live the Mujahideen.”

Women across Asia are being shut out from prosperous forestland because of a paradigm geared towards male ownership, according to a new report by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), an environmental non-governmental organisation.

Plans to expand demand-side financing (DSF) through vouchers could further improve the maternal health of thousands of women in Bangladesh, experts and government officials say.

Despite legislation designed to secure gender equality, women rarely make it beyond deputy positions in the Tajik government, and instead remain stuck in the lower ranks or hit a glass ceiling after reaching middle management.

Tajikistan has no female cabinet ministers, though the state committee for women and family affairs is headed by a woman.

The testimonies of sexual abuses committed during Peru's bloody internal conflict make for grim reading.

"When the first man was finished, the other abused her in the same way," recalls a teenager who witnessed her sister's rape in 1989, at the height of the country's worst political violence.

The government of Mali on Wednesday formally asked the International Criminal Court to investigate atrocities attributed to groups of armed rebels, including Islamic extremists, who established a breakaway ministate in the northern half of the country this year.

The year 2012 has thus far proved promising for the African woman's status within public bodies following the recent election of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as African Union Commission Chair.

It is a clear sign that women are rising more and more above their circumstances.