Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Images of war, rendered on canvas, have traditionally been presented to us in the most morbid forms: John Singer Sargent's chilling trench portrait of blinded troops in Gassed, Picasso's orgy of civil-war violence in Guernica, bloodied battlefields and frontlines from which artists capture live conflict as bombs whizz past them.

The Libyan authorities must end their campaign to discredit Eman al-Obeidi, Amnesty International said today, after the government said she was being sued by the security officials who she says raped her.

San Salvador - El Salvador President, Mauricio Funes inaugurates this Monday the first head office of Women City, a governmental project aimed at giving full support to women.

UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet is expected to be present at the ceremony. Also invited is the general secretary of the Federation of Cuban Women who arrived in El Salvador on Sunday night.

[In December, Refugee Reports editor Bill Frelick visited Chechnya and Ingushetia, as well as Moscow and Stavropol, to assess conditions for people displaced from the war in Chechnya. This article focuses on his trip to Chechnya's capital, Grozny.]

Sandra Morán reminds us all why international grassroots solidarity is so important. “We are all part of the same movement,” she says.

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I. Less than ten kilometres from Bhubaneswar is Dhaulagiri, site of an Asokan edict associated with his renunciation of war. The legend is that Asoka was the archetypal ambitious, ruthless and even fratricidal prince whose brutal wars savaged their victims. The war with Kalinga was no exception. Asoka, moved to remorse at the sight of the destruction he had wrought, is said to have foresworn violence.

Recent media reports have focused on the stalled progress for women in Afghanistan and the shift in the international community's focus as they take steps towards an eventual military withdrawl. Although there's much work to be done, it's important to note that there has been tangible improvement for women in Afghanistan. A decade ago, women weren't allowed to go out in public alone.

An extraordinarily powerful documentary, CALLING THE GHOSTS is the first-person account of two women caught in a war where rape was as much an everyday weapon as bullets or bombs. Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, childhood friends and lawyers, enjoyed the lives of "ordinary modern women" in Bosnia-Herzegovina until one day former neighbors became tormentors.

This Friday, petitioners MADRE, the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), CUNY School of Law and Women's Link Worldwide will testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in Washington, DC on the crisis of sexual violence in Haiti.