President Karzai has given his election cronies the authority to find new ways of filling women’s seats in forthcoming parliamentary ballots, in a move that critics fear will erode constitutional safeguards designed to guarantee female MPs.
However, the decree, issued last week, allows the Commission to find new ways of filling empty posts. “If the vacancies can be filled by male candidates then it’s open to intimidation,” said a women’s rights activist in Kabul. “It’s in the men’s interests to discourage women from standing.” Women in public office already risk death threats.

Grâce au quota soutenu par les Américains, qui impose au moins un quart de femmes au sein du Parlement, ces dernières ont commencé à se faire une place dans le système politique irakien. Mais si elles profiteront de cette règle pour la deuxième fois lors des élections dimanche, elles ont déjà pu constater que le nombre seul ne suffit pas forcément à peser davantage.

Ms. Mu Sochua is a member of a new generation of women who are working their way into the political systems of countries across Asia and elsewhere, from local councils to national assemblies and cabinet positions.

A former minister of women’s affairs, she did as much as anyone to put women’s issues on the agenda of Cambodia as it emerged in the 1990s from decades of war and mass killings. But she lost her public platform in 2004 when she broke with the government, and she is now finding it as difficult to promote her ideas as it is to simply gain attention as a candidate.

At the end of her term on Mar. 11, Michelle Bachelet will be stepping down with a tremendous level of popularity: 83 percent, a record in her country, and almost unheard of in the rest of the world.

The inauguration of rightwing President-elect Sebastián Piñera that day will close a chapter in the history of this South American country of 17 million people, governed by the centre-left coalition Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia since the return to democracy in 1990.

As a result of the gender equity policies implemented by the Bachelet administration, Chile will be the Latin American country with the most gains to show at the Mar. 1-12 meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, in which governments will gather in New York for the 15-year review of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action adopted in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in the Chinese capital.