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.

With the 11th AWID Forum: The Power of Movements having just been held in Cape Town from 14-17th November 2008, AWID covers a new South African women’s initiative which seeks to claim and reclaim women’s place and space in the economic, social, cultural and political history of the country. By Lindiwe Bardill.

Esha Momeni was released on $200,000 bail (deed to her family's house) from Evin prison in Tehran on Monday November 10 at 5 pm, according to the weblog that has been setup in her support.

A summary of the array of presentations and discussions at the 11th AWID Forum is almost impossible. Here, we give a very broad overview of what went on.

At least 60 percent of all women in Sri Lanka have experienced domestic violence, according to the Gender-Based Violence Forum (GBV Forum), a collective of UN and other international and local organisations.

Alual Koch was 13 when she learnt to kill with a gun, fighting government soldiers as a jungle guerrilla in Sudan's devastating north-south civil war.

For four days, Cape Town's convention centre will be filled with a profusion of languages, colours, and ideas as some 2,200 delegates from 144 countries take part in the 11th International Forum on Women's Rights and Development, organised by the Association of Women in Development (AWID).

Statement from AWID

In one week’s time, the 11th International AWID Forum will begin in Cape Town, South Africa. AWID spoke with two South African women’s rights activists about their work, their hopes for and concerns about the Forum.

AWID interviews Shamillah Wilson about the recently held 2nd African Feminist Forum in Uganda. By Rochelle Jones

Amid the celebrations of today's dawn of a new era in American politics, it is worth asking how the expression on the religious face that the United States presents to the rest of the world has changed with the election of Barack Obama as President.

"Christianity reaches more people than healthcare," Stephen Waititi, a former church deacon and the medical director of Milmay Centre, an HIV/Aids clinic in Kampala, pointed out recently.

AWID interviews Lynda Yanz* from the Maquila Solidarity Network about their latest research on funding for women’s labour rights in Mexico and Central America.