Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Jan Kubis said that despite the good news of a fall in annual civilian casualties in Afghanistan - the first decline in several years - the casualties of women subjected to violence are on the increase.

The United Nations said last month that more than 300 women and girls were killed and more than 560 injured during 2012.

On Wednesday March 20, Rios Montt, the former president of Guatemala, went on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala City. It is the first time ever, anywhere in the world, that a country has prosecuted an ex-head of state for genocide.

The charges go back to Guatemala's civil war, a war that lasted 36 years and killed two hundred thousand people - most of them indigenous Maya.

Israel has detained more than 15,000 Palestinian women since 1967, the Palestinian Minister of Women's Affairs said on Thursday, according to the Middle East Monitor (MEMO) report received by Mi'raj News Agency (MEMO) Saturday.

Internally displaced people in Somalia are suffering sexual violence and other forms of abuse, reports the Human Rights Watch (HRW) campaign group.

The abuse takes place at the hands of armed groups, including government forces, it says.

In the report, women who fled famine and conflict describe being gang-raped in camps in the capital, Mogadishu.

The sheer number of women sexually abused and gang raped in a single public square had become too big to ignore. Conservative Islamists in Egypt's new political elite were outraged — at the women.

“Sometimes,” said Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a police general, lawmaker and ultraconservative Islamist, “a girl contributes 100 percent to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions.”

Indian campaigners have accused the car company Ford of sabotaging attempts to reduce the rising number of rapes after an advertisement showed three scantily-dressed young women in the boot of its Figo car.

The ad, which was produced by its Indian advertising agency JWT, provoked an outcry after it was released onto the internet with women's rights groups attacking the company for insensitivity.

Several Libyan organisations fighting for women's rights held a demo on Thursday morning against deteriorating human rights situation of women in the country.

Gathered in front of the headquarters of the Council of Ministers, the protesters denounced high rate of persecution, violence, harassment, kidnapping and rape of women.

In March 2004, President George W. Bush gave a speech to an audience of 250 women from around the world to commemorate International Women's Day. His speech focused on the women of Iraq and Afghanistan who he proudly proclaimed were “learning the blessings of freedom” thanks to the United States.

Around 700 years ago, Queen Goharshad, wife of a Timouri heir, is said to have inspired a Renaissance in Herat, Afghanistan's western province. Seven centuries later, a group of women filmmakers in Afghanistan have inspired a similar change in their war-ravaged country.

Reeva Steenkamp, the model and law graduate shot and killed by Oscar Pistorius, was statistically just one of three women killed on Valentine's Day by an intimate partner, according to a study on violence against women that damns South Africa as having “the highest rate ever reported in research anywhere in the world.”