Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

This week, for the first time, the United States submitted a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, a rotating body of countries that peer-review U.N. member countries' human rights records. This submission is historic. Where the Bush administration spent years criticizing the U.N. and human rights processes, in this report the Obama administration has stressed an end to U.S.

Although the human rights violations in the Indian-held Kashmir has been continuing by the Indian security forces since the partition, yet the same practice has intensified in wake of the current phase of Kashmir struggle which began on August 12, 2008 when Indian forces killed Hurriyat Conference leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz along with five other persons who were protesting against the government decision to allot 800 kanal of Kashmiri land to a

Some are ambushed as they return from washing themselves or in their flimsy tents in the middle of the night, others are confronted by two or three attackers at a time.

Local and international aid groups have reported a sharp increase in rape and sexual assault against Haitian women still living in makeshift camps sprawled across the capital following the earthquake in January.

Rwandan and Congolese rebels gang-raped nearly 200 women and some baby boys over four days within miles of a U.N. peacekeepers' base in an eastern Congo mining district, an American aid worker and a Congolese doctor said Monday.

Will F. Cragin of the International Medical Corps said aid and U.N. workers knew rebels had occupied Luvungi town and surrounding villages in eastern Congo the day after the attack began on July 30.

A U.N. human rights investigation mission will be launched in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) Wednesday, U.N. officials announced Tuesday, after gruesome reports surfaced in the media of the systematic gang rape of nearly 200 women in a 21km stretch of 15 villages.

A mob of Rwandan rebels gang-raped at least 179 women last month during a weekend raid on a community of villages in eastern Congo, the United Nations said Monday.

The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or F.D.L.R., was blamed for the attack. The F.D.L.R. is an ethnic Hutu rebel group that has been terrorizing the hills of eastern Congo for years, preying on villages in a quest for the natural resources beneath them.

A record number of women are running in Afghanistan's critical parliamentary elections next month despite many being inundated with threatening phone calls, including death threats from insurgents.

Amid ever-rising violence, which some people fear could foster a repeat of last year's catastrophic presidential election, women are struggling to campaign at all outside a few areas, poll monitors say.

Each night before she goes to sleep, Umm Shekar checks to make sure her pistol is loaded and tucks it beneath her mattress.

Increasingly worried about being robbed by criminal gangs or insurgents, the mother of six bought the weapon so she could defend herself and her family.

Her husband, a clothes importer-exporter, spends much of his time outside of Iraq, adding to her sense of vulnerability.

The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to become Bangladesh.

IOM Colombia is training public officials on gender-based violence against women; how to identify it, address it and provide assistance to victims.