Participation

On Sunday, Sept. 25, 2011 King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia announced that Saudi women now have the right to serve as members of the Shura Council, the appointed consultative council that advises the king, and are allowed to run as candidates and nominate candidates in the next set of municipal elections which will be in 2015. This new law will make a historic change in the role of women in Saudi Arabia.

Kenya has been voted the best country in the world for passing laws that enable women to conduct business during the last two years.

A new World Bank and International Finance Corporation report rates Kenya highly in a global survey of what governments are doing to remove barriers that stop women from conducting business.

Liberians voted Tuesday in the country's second presidential election since the end of a brutal civil war, choosing from a roster of 16 candidates that include a Nobel laureate, a nephew of a former president, a former warlord infamous for slicing off his foe's ears and a businessman-diplomat, among others.

The pursuit of equal rights for women has been broadened in recent years with the growing recognition that the empowerment of women plays a vital role in the restoration of peace in societies divided by conflict and war. This is not a simplistic matter of men making war and women making peace, of one sex's aggressive drives being moderated by the other's supposedly gentler instincts.

Following a remarkable year in the promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment that was marked by the establishment of UN-Women and the launch of the Secretary-General's Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health, it was now time to turn the momentum generated in 2010 into clear, tangible gains for women and girls everywhere, the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) was told today.

In its statement to the world, the Norwegian Nobel Committee honored women warriors battling for peace and said it hoped the Peace Prize would help to ”realise the great potential for democracy and peace that women can represent.” Now comes a test of the world's resolve to achieve that potential. Afghanistan.

Tawakkol Karman is an amazing woman. She is a revolutionary, a protest leader, a human rights activist, a journalist, a politician, a mother and now a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Second Secretary at the Kazakh Mission to UN Askar Zhumabayev emphasized that Kazakhstan, at the national level, was strongly committed to the further advancement of women and gender equality, particularly through implementing its National Law on State Guarantees of Equal Rights and Equal Opportunities and its Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence.

Forty women were wounded in Yemen's second largest city when regime supporters attacked an all-female street celebration of the Nobel Peace prize win of Tawakkul Karman, medical officials said Monday. The women were attacked on Sunday evening in the city of Taez as they marched in support of Karman, the first Arab woman to win the prestigious award.

Following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Afghan women emerged as a high-profile focus of U.S. policy. Women's progress was promoted as a powerful, positive product of the international presence in the war-scarred country. But ten years later, with negotiation and reconciliation widely viewed as the only options for ending the war, Afghan women's rights seems largely forgotten.