Ten years after a United Nations Security Council resolution aimed at re-evaluating women's roles in U.N.-brokered peacekeeping efforts, women are still underrepresented in the peacekeeping process.

The ‘women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights' mantra of the 1990s raised expectation that violence against women would be taken seriously by governments and people around the world. Instead, the epidemic of gender violence, namely rape and other forms of sexual violence, has escalated, from wars zones to main streets and blind alleys and rural areas without formal wars.

The credibility of the United Nations rests in a major way on its ability and capacity to get the decisions of the Security Council implemented in letter and spirit.

The original inhabitants of the equatorial forests of Africa's Great Lakes region – the Batwa Indigenous community - are decrying the high rate of violence against women, says a new report.

The United Nations is investigating claims that rebel fighters raped more than 150 women and baby boys in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The attacks happened over four days within miles of a UN base, a US aid worker and a Congolese doctor said.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon is sending two top aides to the country to help investigate the alleged assaults in the country's volatile eastern region.

Ministry for Foreign Affairs

Does the incorporation of women in formal peace processes pose a threat to the possible achievements of women's grassroots peace organizations in the transition from conflict to peace? Should women insist on joining formal peace negotiations, or maintain feminist resistance from outside?

They arrive with ideas for waste management, new media, health clinics and environmental education, speaking Arabic or Hebrew. Funded by the US federal government, 10 aspiring women entrepreneurs - five from Jordan and five from Israel - are heading to the United States this month to engage in a mini-MBA experience that will hopefully, ultimately advance peace in the Middle East.

An Alberta woman who was held hostage for more than 15 months in Somalia has started a foundation to send women in the war-torn country to university.

Amanda Lindhout hopes the charitable foundation will be able send 10 women to school next year and 100 women over the next four years in the country where only four per cent of women pursue higher education.

Iran has sentenced in absentia award-winning women's rights activist Shadi Sadr and another fellow activist to jail and lashes over a protest in 2007, their lawyer told ILNA news agency on Sunday.

Former MP Mohsen Armin, who is a senior member of a reformist party which backs opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, was also arrested in Tehran on Sunday, his daughter told a reformist website.