General Women, Peace and Security

In one year since CGI commitment, Digital Democracy has trained 150 women and built a database documenting over 400 cases of rape in Haiti. The only phone-based emergency response system dedicated to rape and sexual assault in Haiti has been designed, launched and tested by Digital Democracy (Dd) and KOFAVIV, the Commission for Women Victims for Victims.

Millennium Development Goal Three of the UN has put 2015 as deadline to eliminate gender inequality and empower women at all levels including education, health, employment, equal opportunity and dignity among others. Reports show that many African countries are still far from meeting the target.

In the month of August 2011, EASSI completed her second month-long training on the gender dimension of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) that targeted the countries of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia and Southern Sudan.

Sexual violence in conflict represents a threat to peace and security and is not just a health or human rights issue, top United Nations officials told Member States today at a mini-summit on preventing and responding to sexual violence in conflict.

Women's rights have been central to the war in Afghanistan. Remember when Cherie Blair and Laura Bush joined forces to bolster the rationale for invasion back in 2001? Suddenly, the west developed a passionate concern for the position of women in the country; there were films, books and documentaries about the high rates of maternal mortality, girls being married off young and low levels of female literacy.

Madeleine Rees, a former U.N. human rights official and the inspiration for one of the heroines in the film The Whistleblower, was wrongfully dismissed from her job with the Geneva-based U.N. Office of the High Commission for Human Rights in March 2010, according to a ruling by the U.N.'s administrative disputes tribunal.

As rebels stormed Col. Moammar Gadhafi's lavish Tripoli compound in August, one foreign correspondent, Alex Crawford of Sky News, was there to cover the action. At one point, she even interviewed an ecstatic rebel fighter wearing one of Gadhafi's military caps stolen from the dictator's master bedroom. Crawford has been called the journalistic face of the Libyan conflict.

Michelle Bachelet first met Hillary Clinton at a photo opportunity, when the Chilean was on the cusp of becoming her country's first female presidential candidate. The two women wound up talking for almost an hour, on women, politics and health policy.

The UN Women (United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) and the Karnataka government on Wednesday signed a project cooperation agreement to empower elected women representatives and promote gender responsive good governance. The agreement was signed between the department of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (RDPR), government of Karnataka and the UN Women.

The United Nations today marked the annual International Day of Peace with tributes to those working to build a better future as well as a call to people everywhere to make their voices heard to strengthen peace and democracy.