Asia

Traffic stalled and offices stood still for five minutes Tuesday as women's rights activists protested against the exclusion of female ministers in the new Cabinet.

Positioning themselves as roadblocks in Downtown, Hamra and Sassine Square, the groups of several dozen demonstrators, part of the Lebanese Women's Movement, held banners saying “A Cabinet without women is going backward.”

After years of campaigning by women's organizations, the Kurdish Parliament has finally passed a tough anti-domestic violence law that will create a special court to address domestic violence cases.

Two Iranian activists have been arrested as a group of political prisoners ended a hunger strike protesting the death of a women's rights activist, friends say.

A South Asian regional conference on “Promoting Gender Responsive Democratic Governance in South Asia” has started in Kathmandu from Tueday.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban appear to have ordered their cadres to increasingly use women to carry out suicide and armed attacks, Pakistan's security officials and western defense officials have told CBS News.

Prison guards in Iran are giving condoms to criminals and encouraging them to systematically rape young opposition activists locked up with them, according to accounts from inside the country's jail system.

A series of dramatic letters written by prisoners and families of imprisoned activists allege that authorities are intentionally facilitating mass rape and using it as a form of punishment.

Advocacy Forum, an NGO working for human rights, today called on the government to exercise due diligence to prevent and investigate cases of torture against women in detention and work towards improving the condition of detention for women.

Complaints with regard to child abuse and sexual offences against women and children in Sri Lanka are increasing dramatically specially since 1995, said Lawyers for Human Rights and Development (LHRD) Executive Director Attorney-at-Law Kalyananda Thiranagama.

The number of complaints of this nature was just over 900 in 1995 and this was over 2,000 in 2010 reflecting remarkable increase within 15 years, he said.

Six shelters for battered women are likely to close because the organizations running them for years did not win the tender issued by the Social Affairs Ministry to operate them.

Bandaged and bruised, Rumana Manzur is pleading for justice after suffering a brutal assault that left her blind.

The 33-year-old University of British Columbia graduate student and assistant professor at Dhaka University in Bangladesh recently had her eyes gouged and her nose bitten by her husband, Hasan Sayeed Sumon, who claimed she was having an affair in Canada.