Women's Rights, Women | featured news

"Listen to my story! Listen to my pain and suffering!" Afghanistan's first female rapper Sosan Firooz pleads into her microphone. With her first rap song, the outspoken 23-year-old singer is making history in her homeland where society frowns on women who take the stage. She is already shunned by some of her relatives.

The past 12 months have seen a series of notable successes for African women - with two Nobel Peace prizes, a second president and the first female head of the African Union Commission. For the BBC's Africa Debate programme, Malawian women's rights campaigner Jessie Kabwila asks if Africa's women are on the rise.

India, a country best-known for its rising economic might, is the worst place to be a woman among the world’s biggest economies, and Canada the best, according to a survey of experts published Wednesday... “Canada leads the pack with its promotion of women’s access and opportunities across various sectors of society, including education, economic participation and health care,” Sarah Degnan Kambou, president of the International Center for Research on Women in Washington, which took part in the survey, told TrustLaw.

An Egyptian civilian court ordered the army on Tuesday to end forced virginity tests on female detainees in military prisons.

President Hamid Karzai has pardoned a jailed rape victim, but only after she agreed to marry the man she says raped her. The 19-year-old woman, whose name is Gulnaz, was one of the subjects of a documentary recently produced by the European Union, highlighting the phenomenon of rape victims being imprisoned for the "moral crime" of having sex outside marriage, even against their will.

Africa's first democratically elected female president, a Liberian campaigner against rape and a woman who stood up to Yemen's autocratic regime won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of the importance of women's rights in the spread of global peace. The Norwegian Nobel Committee split the prize between Tawakkul Karman, a leader of anti-government protests in Yemen; Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman to win a free presidential election in Africa; and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, who campaigned against the use of rape as a weapon in her country's brutal civil war.

Saudi Arabia will allow women to stand for election and vote, the king announced on Sunday, in a significant policy shift in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

Parris Island, the South Carolina military installation that has trained thousands of young Marines, has its first female commander.

The spirit of the Arab Spring broke the steel gates of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia today as one by one Saudi women started their engines, defying the country’s notorious ban on women driving, the only place in the world where women are not permitted to drive.