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Women's Human Rights
“It is necessary for us to reinterpret and redefine our cultures and to seek indigenous roots for our rights to change when we must, to search what is authentically supportive of our rights, and to replace what has been shaped to uphold patriarchal social structures.”- Mahnaz Afkhami, President & CEO, Women’s Learning Partnership
By advancing women’s leadership and facilitating communication and cooperation among and between women, WLP aims to realize the promise of women’s human rights.
We strive to raise public awareness of, and mobilize international support for, human rights claims made by women in the Global South, particularly women in Muslim-majority societies.
In cooperation with our partner organizations, we engage in campaigns for women’s human rights, such as Claiming Equal Citizenship: The Campaign for Arab Women's Right to Nationality.
As part of the WLP Translation Series, we publish unique advocacy tools for the advancement of women’s human rights, such as the Guide to Equality in the Family in the Maghreb, which focuses on strategies for the reform of family law in Muslim-majority societies.
To encourage cross-border solidarity and facilitate activists’ campaign research, we provide an online collection of national and international legislation with relevance to women’s human rights, including comparative information on family laws that affect the lives of women and girls in Muslim-majority societies.
We send out human rights alerts to raise awareness of urgent human rights challenges faced by our partner organizations, as well as to mobilize support for important campaigns.
We also host a poetry and literature series, Life Lines: The Literature of Women's Human Rights, in the belief that women’s writing connects readers to the challenges faced by women in realizing their rights and increases their responsiveness to calls for solidarity and action.
Resources on Women’s Human Rights
- Women's Human Rights Facts & Figures
- Profiles of Women's Human Rights Experts
- Multimedia: Leading to Change: Eliminating Violence Against Women in Muslim Societies
- Women's Human Rights Bibliographies
More Stories and Reports
Iranian Women’s Rights Activist, Hana Abdi, Sentenced to Five Years in Prison
June 20, 2008
| SUPPORT IRANIAN WOMEN |
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Sign the petition and help them reach their goal of one million signatures to end discriminatory laws against women.
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Hana Abdi, a 21 year-old student and women’s rights activist, has been sentenced to a five year prison term in the West Azarbaijan Province. A member of Azar Mehr Women’s NGO and One Million Signatures campaign activist in Kurdistan, Ms. Abdi has been in detention since her November 2007 arrest in Sanandaj, Kurdistan for her peaceful activities in support of women’s rights and the One Million Signatures campaign.
Support Iranian Women on their National Day of Solidarity
June 2, 2008
Iranian women's rights activists are calling for international support in observance of the June 12, 2006 demonstrations. Two years ago on this day, activists organized a peaceful protest demanding the revision of discriminatory laws against women in Iran. Seventy people were arrested during the gathering and continue to this day to be summoned, charged, arrested and sentenced for peaceful activism. June 12th has since been chosen by Iranian women’s rights activists as their national day of solidarity to object harmful actions which attempt to silence Iranian women.
| SUPPORT IRANIAN WOMEN |
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Sign the "One Million Signatures" campaign petition calling for an end to discriminatory laws against women such as men's uncontested right to divorce, polygamy, and child custody.
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Please read the following "Statement in Support of Iranian Women" and send your personal or organizational support for the women’s rights activists who are fighting for their basic human rights against all odds. Please send emails to wlp@learningpartnership.org and hadighaemi@iranhumanrights.org. For more information about the campaign efforts, please read below or visit the One Million Signatures website.
Partnering for Change: Movement Building in the 21st Century
January 21, 2007: At the Seventh World Social Forum in Nairobi, Women’s Learning Partnership (WLP) presented an interactive panel and dialogue with women’s rights activists from Africa and the Middle East who discussed strategies to strengthen social movements, particularly the women’s movement, in an era of crisis for civic organizing. Efforts to achieve gender equality, human rights, and social justice are being increasingly challenged by rising extremism and fundamentalism, wars and conflict, poverty, and violence. Activists are overcoming these barriers by working together to devise innovative, context-relevant strategies that will transform power relations and dynamics with the family, community, and society.
Symposium Builds Momentum for International Efforts to Eliminate Violence Against Women
More than 250 activists, policy-makers, UN representatives, scholars, and heads of NGOs from 40 countries gathered at Women's Learning Partnership's (WLP) international symposium, "Leading to Change: Eliminating Violence against Women in Muslim Societies," on March 1 in New York. Held in conjunction with the United Nation's 49th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the Symposium was an energizing and movement-building event that brought together grassroots activists, including WLP partners, and international policy-makers to discuss the major challenges to eliminating gender violence as well as grassroots, national, and regional measures to promote women's human rights. Three panel discussions on "Culture, Conflict and Extremism," "International Perspectives on Eliminating Violence Against Women," and "Women, Empowerment, and Justice" were each followed by dynamic Q&A sessions between speakers and audience members.
Launch of Translation Series: New Advocacy Tool for the Reform of Family Law in Muslim-Majority Societies
Guide to Equality in the Family in the Maghreb is the first volume in a new Translation Series launched by WLP to increase the availability of feminist works produced in the Global South, especially those that lucidly define women’s issues, identify fields of opportunity, and map out strategies to empower women and to promote women’s human rights.
The Guide is a unique advocacy tool developed by Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité, a coalition of women’s organizations from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, to communicate a shared vision of legal reform supporting the development of more egalitarian families, communities, and societies. The Guide outlines a process that relates meaningful social change to women’s capability to make deliberate and thoughtful choices.
