International

International: UN Special Rapporteur on Torture’s Statement on Acid Attacks and Women

The following text is a statement by Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, made in a Side Event sponsored by Women’s UN Report Network, Worldwide Organization for Women and NGO Committee on the Status of Women-Geneva and delivered at the UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva, on 15 September 2010:

International: Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet to head New United Nations Women's Agency (UN Women)

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today (14 September) named former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet to head United Nations Women (UN Women), a newly created entity to oversee all of the world body’s programmes aimed at promoting women’s rights and full participation in global affairs.

The new body – which will receive a large boost in funding and become operational in January – merges four UN agencies and offices: the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues, and the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW).

International: “Challenges of Change: Religion, Secularism & Rights”

A one-day event will be held on “Challenges of Change: Religion, Secularism & Rights” in Washington, DC on 21 September 2010. The event is organized by the Women’s Learning Partnership (WLP) in cooperation with Cultural Conversations of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University.

Mondiale: Les intellectuels arabes entre Etats et intégrisme

Là où, dans la plupart des pays arabes, on imagine un affrontement, c’est plutôt un jeu permanent d’alliances, un pacte tacite entre trois puissances inégales : autorisés à élargir leur emprise dans la société, les fondamentalistes cessent de privilégier la conquête du pouvoir politique ; protégés par l’Etat de la férule des intégristes, les intellectuels laïques taisent les travers autoritaires du pouvoir et réservent leur militantisme à des causes consensuelles ; ménagé par les intellectuels et toléré par les religieux, l’Etat autoritaire perdure.

International: Symposium on US Trafficking Victims Protection Act & UN Trafficking Protocol: Call for papers

On November 2, 2010, The Protection Project will host the Fifth Annual Symposium on “The US Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the UN Trafficking Protocol: Ten years Later” at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, D.C., USA. The Protection Project is now calling for scholarly papers describing and analyzing the lessons learned in the legal, political, cultural, social, or economic fields since the enactment of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children in the year 2000. Scholars and professionals are encouraged to apply. The authors of the selected papers will be invited to present the findings of their study at The Protection Project Fifth Annual Symposium. Following the Symposium, selected papers will be published in The Protection Project Journal of Human Rights and Civil Society, 4th ed.

Mondiale: APPEL À ARTICLES : Les antiféminismes

Le développement des féminismes s’est historiquement accompagné de celui des antiféminismes. Tout comme le féminisme prend plusieurs formes, l’antiféminisme se présente en effet sous divers aspects, d’où le titre provisoire « Les antiféminismes ».

International: Not the Church, Not the State? Gender equality in the crossfire

The challenge to platforms for gender equality comes not just from actors with fundamentalist agendas, but from a conjuncture where women’s rights have been opportunistically instrumentalized to serve geopolitical goals, and neo-liberal policies have severed social justice from gender equality concerns

International: Conference on Women’s Rights in Egypt and Arab States

The Protection Project at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, in cooperation with the Alexandria University Faculty of Law in Alexandria, Egypt, will be hosting a conference on “Women’s Rights in Egypt and Arab States,” which will take place December 1 – 2, 2010 at the Helnan Palestine Hotel in Alexandria, Egypt. The conference will bring together professors of law, religion and social sciences and representatives from NGOs and other elements of civil society to discuss a broad array of topics related to the rights of women in the Arab world, including Islamic law, personal status and family laws, and labor and political rights, among others.

International: Silence on rending Muslim veil from liberals & feminists

The French parliament's vote this week to ban full-length veils in public was the right move by the wrong group. Some have tried to present the ban as a matter of Islam vs. the West. It is not. First, Islam is not monolithic. It, like other major religions, has strains and sects. Many Muslim women -- despite their distaste for the European political right wing -- support the ban precisely because it is a strike against the Muslim right wing.

L'ONU: Création d'une superstructure dédiée à la condition féminine

L'ONU s'est dotée vendredi 2 juillet d'une nouvelle structure disposant de forts pouvoirs, chargée d'accélérer l'amélioration de la condition des femmes dans le monde. L'Assemblée générale, où siègent les 192 Etats membres des Nations unies, a adopté à l'unanimité une résolution portant création de cette "Entité de l'ONU pour l'égalité de genre et l'autonomisation des femmes" ou, pour faire plus court, "ONU Femmes".