Participation

The United Nations' agency devoted to women's empowerment has created a high-level civil society advisory group for Latin America and the Caribbean to provide political and technical advice and to act as a link to civil society organizations in the region.

On July 11th, Remzija Delic will see her children again. For most of them it will be a long journey home - from Austria, the Netherlands and the USA. The family left after the war but every year they return to see their mother and remember their father. He was murdered with 8000 others in 1995, in a massacre later described by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as the worst crime committed on European soil since the Second World War.

Female protesters continue to participate in pro-democracy demonstrations that remain deadly more than a year after President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown.

Last Sunday former nationalist leader Tomislav Nikolic was elected as Serbia's new president. But a majority of the Serbs refrained from voting. And with the political parties only talking about women as mothers, women don't have much hope of getting a government that deals with inequalities in the society.

From the very beginning of his administration, President Barack Obama has put women at the heart of United States foreign policy, says Melanne Verveer, the United States Ambassador-at-large for Global Women's Issues. And that is because the most pressing global problems cannot be solved without the participation of women.

The video that accompanies this story can be found here.

Buoyed by the winds of change sweeping the region, Libyan women are eyeing a far greater role for themselves after next month's national assembly elections.

With the US and NATO planning the departure of their forces from Afghanistan by December 2014, some Afghan women and international rights advocates are growing increasingly concerned that a decade-long focus on expanding Afghan women's rights will go with them.

After Egyptian women stood shoulder to shoulder with men in the protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak, many looked forward to a role in the revolution's next steps. But 15 months later, as Egyptians prepare to vote for a new president this week, rights activists complain that women are being excluded from key decisions.

“There is need to provide more information about how individuals and organisations can know more about the UN Commission on the Status of Women, as well as participate in the local processes leading to it,” said Lucy Mazingi, director of the Youth Empowerment Trust.

The head of the United Nations entity mandated to promote gender equality today welcomed the increase in women's representation in Algeria's new parliament as a result of elections held last week, and stressed that it represented a step towards democratic reform and gender equality.