Participation

Female lawmaker Fatemeh Alia said on Sunday that her nomination as education minister has become certain.

"In the light of my 20-experience in education. I have been selected as the final choice for the ministry of education," Alia told the Mehr News Agency.

Alia represents the people of Tehran at the parliament.

A group of women who are risking imprisonment to collect 1 million signatures on a petition demanding greater women's rights in Iran were presented on October with the Anna Politkovskaya award for courage.

Dozens of Afghan women protested against the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan (IECA) on October 7 for allegedly allocating less seats for women on the country's provincial councils, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reported.

Activists at the rally, which was organized by civil society organizations in Kabul, demanded a greater role for women on Afghanistan's provincial councils.

Iran has confiscated the Nobel peace medal and diploma of Shirin Ebadi, the human rights lawyer who is one of the hardline regime's most outspoken critics. Her bank account has also been frozen on the pretext that she owes almost £250,000 in tax.

As the world waits for President Barack Obama to announce next week his plan to send up to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, three female leaders of civil society efforts focused their concerns on nation building.

The trio wanted to talk about something else: the country's recovery.

Afghan women are among the worst off in the world, violence against them is "endemic" and Afghanistan's government fails to protect them from crimes such as rape and murder, a rights group has said.

Human Rights Watch said in a report the situation for women in Afghanistan is "dismal in every area."

On the 30th anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the regional Coalition for “Equality without reservation” launched a call to Heads of State of Arab countries to promote the equality and citizenship of Arab women and in particular to:

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan — Several hundred women, many holding aloft pictures of relatives killed by drug lords or Taliban militants, held a loud but nonviolent street protest today, demanding that President Hamid Karzai purge from his government anyone connected to corruption, war crimes or the Taliban.

Numerous women's rights campaigners, female journalists and relatives are being arrested and persecuted as authorities in the Islamic Republic of Iran attempt to repress masses of Iranians from advocating for their civil rights in recent weeks, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said today.