On the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we pay attention to the ways that religious groups are trying to claim that their right to religious freedom entitles them to oppress others.

The crusade for Proposition 8 was fueled by the broken American family, explains gay Catholic author Richard Rodriguez.

Frustrated by the failure to overturn Roe v. Wade, a growing number of antiabortion pastors, conservative academics and activists are setting aside efforts to outlaw abortion and instead are focusing on building social programs and developing other assistance for pregnant women to reduce the number of abortions.

So many men were killed during the Rwandan genocide that women have increasingly found themselves in positions of power. How is that changing the country? Chris McGreal reports.

Umida Niazova is an Uzbek journalist and human rights defender. She has done work for the Center on Extreme Journalism, the Russian service of Radio Liberty, Freedom House, the International Crisis Group, the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch, among other organizations. Her work has exposed her to persecution by the Uzbek government, including arrest and detention last year. AWID spoke to her about the situation of human rights defence work in Uzbekistan.

Three women are standing side by side locked arm in arm and shouting. They are among those women who, at the beginning of the cold winter of 1357, transformed International Women's Day into a day of protest with their shouting.

This week, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns sixty. There is much to celebrate, but progress on the realisation of rights has been extremely slow.

In September of this year, UN member states passed a resolution to move swiftly to create a new UN agency for women, a move, packaged with a series of reforms on governance and funding, that they hope will result in renewed public faith in the UN system.