Advocacy & Development
Bangladesh has much to celebrate this International Day of Democracy. On February 12, the country successfully held one of the world’s largest elections of 2026, with close to 7.6 crore citizens participating. The largely peaceful poll and orderly transition to an elected government marked an important achievement for the people of Bangladesh, and for the institutions and individuals who helped make it possible. This achievement opens a window of opportunity to bring democratic institutions closer to people’s aspirations. Those aspirations were powerfully expressed during the student-led movement of July and August 2024, when calls for fairness grew into a wider demand for a body politic that better reflected the people of Bangladesh. Women were present in the movement but largely absent from the decision-making table. The courage of those who spoke out, and the lives lost, remain a powerful reminder of the need for responsive institutions and accountable leadership.
Parliamentarians from around the world gathered at the United Nations in New York on 14 July for the IPU Parliamentary Forum at the 2026 UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), where they reviewed progress and shared good parliamentary practice on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The annual HLPF is the main global accountability platform for the SDGs where lawmakers are recognized not only as observers, but as key actors in holding governments to account, shaping legislation and approving budgets.
The IPU meeting began with a focus on SDG 11, which covers sustainable cities and communities, before broadening to the wider challenge of SDG implementation and the future of the global development agenda after 2030.
According to UN-Habitat, the UN agency responsible for urban development and human settlements, three billion people struggle to afford adequate housing, while more than one billion live in slums or informal settlements.
Since the 1990s, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been rocked by continuous armed conflicts stemming from various factors, including internal tensions, regional instability, and a legacy of colonialism. Today, more than 100 active armed groups operate in this country.
The conflict currently marring eastern DRC first began in 2012. Rebels from the March 23 Movement (M23) took up arms in the North Kivu Province, claiming that the central DRC government had failed to honor the 2009 peace agreement it had signed with the M23 predecessor, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP).
In areas gripped by armed conflict, sexual violence against women is prevalent. However, the perpetrators are not only soldiers or armed rebels. Civilians also take this opportunity to abuse and rape women seeking domestic work in their homes.
This is precisely what happened to Charline, a young woman in her twenties. Staring blankly ahead as tears streamed down her face, her sadness was evident.
In May 2026, I launched the first phase of a project aimed at understanding how sexist hate speech operates in Kosovo’s online public sphere with the help of AI tools. While discussions about online violence against women have become increasingly common, there is still limited local research examining the actual language used in these attacks and the social narratives they reproduce.
The project was motivated by a simple but important question: What role does sexist hate speech play in public discourse? Is it merely a collection of offensive comments posted by anonymous users, or does it serve a broader discursive function?
Understanding these dynamics is important because online discourse increasingly shapes public attitudes, political participation, and perceptions of who belongs in public life. If misogynistic narratives become normalized online, they can discourage women from participating in public debate and reinforce existing inequalities.
A disturbing picture
After putting together a team to facilitate the project, we began monitoring social media comments published on 22 major Kosovo-based Facebook and YouTube pages. We collected and analyzed 625 comments across 67 social media posts published between May 1 and 31, 2026.
These posts were made by well-established media outlets that report on national news.
The monitoring period coincided with the local election campaign and a period of intensive political debate online.
The findings paint a disturbing picture of how women are discussed in Kosovo’s digital public sphere — one that is even more disturbing than many might imagine.
In the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), violence against women has become increasingly alarming. Statistics from the first quarter of 2026 expose a major gender-based violence (GBV) crisis. Although the fight is mounting amid security vulnerabilities, social taboos, and citizen mobilizations, victims still suffer the consequences while the problem persists.
In just three months, healthcare professionals recorded more than 1,100 rape cases in the Uvira health zone, an administrative and operational health district located in South Kivu, eastern DRC. Behind this chilling statistic lies an all-too-familiar reality. Violence has become an everyday occurrence, severely impacting women and girls. Chronic insecurity, mass population displacement, and persistent discriminatory norms fuel this physical, psychological, sexual, and economic violence.
Despite several years of awareness-raising campaigns, victims seldom report such incidents. A fear of reprisal, stigmatization, and family rejection forces many into silence, hampering prevention and care efforts.
I am a girl from Afghan soil, a land that has buried countless dreams beneath its surface.
I was a girl with big dreams for my future. Dreams I knew I could only achieve through hard work, education, and resilience in the face of many challenges.
Alongside my father, who stood by me like a strong fortress, I worked tirelessly to move closer to my dreams, sparing no effort in pursuit of my goal.
Then my country was engulfed in the flames of war, and the dreams of many of us were reduced to ashes. Still, I did not lose hope. I continued striving, despite the harsh circumstances, to reach a bright and prosperous future.
This report was written by researchers from the Organization for Justice and Accountability in the Horn of Africa (OJAH) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
The report benefited from reviews by members of PHR staff, the PHR Advisory Council, and the PHR Board of Directors, as well as members of the OJAH Board of Directors.
The research team would like to recognize the strength and resilience of the survivors whose experiences and stories are reflected in this data, as well as the dedication of the health professionals who provided services and documented these violations—often at grave risk to their personal safety.
About Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) uses medicine and science to document and draw attention to human rights violations. PHR was founded on the belief that physicians and other health professionals possess unique skills that lend significant credibility to the investigation and documentation of human rights abuses.
In response to the scourge of sexual violence, PHR launched its Program on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones in 2011. The program works to confront impunity for sexual violence in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Iraq, Kenya, Myanmar, and Ukraine.
PHR has conducted research to understand the scale and scope of conflict-related sexual violence in various conflicts and contexts, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone.
About the Organization for Justice and Accountability in the Horn of Africa (OJAH)
The Organization for Justice and Accountability in the Horn of Africa (OJAH) is an independent and impartial organization dedicated to strengthening justice and accountability mechanisms in the Horn of Africa through evidence collection and preservation.
The organization’s mission is to deter war crimes, crimes against humanity, conflict-related sexual violence, and other severe human rights abuses across the Greater Horn of Africa. It pursues this mission by conducting documentation and investigations, advancing the environment for justice and accountability, preserving and analyzing materials, and supporting international justice and accountability actors and efforts.
Full report here.
This report advocates for thorough protection of human rights in the digital age, emphasizing the strength of constitutional safeguards over ordinary legislation. As digital technologies increasingly influence civil and political rights, online as well as offline, robust constitutional frameworks are essential to address new challenges such as unwarranted surveillance, censorship and data monopolies. Ensuring adequate constitutional protection helps anchor fundamental rights in an evolving digital landscape.
Click here to read the full report.
It’s been six months since the latest spark ignited mass protests in Iran — the death of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa (Jina) Amini in morality police custody after she was arrested for allegedly failing to wear her hijab properly.
The outrage over her killing resulted in women-led protests. Their slogan “woman, life, freedom,” originally a Kurdish manifesto, has helped fuel the Iranian protesters’ demands for radical change.
Read more: Iranian women keep up the pressure for real change – but will broad public support continue?
The perseverance, bravery and determination of the Iranian protesters, particularly women and girls, have been heroic. Despite risks to their lives and freedoms due to a brutal government crackdown, many remain active in publicly articulating their grievances in a variety of ways.
In recent months, while some street presence has continued in Iran — for example, in response to the poisonings of schoolgirls in cities across the country — protesters are also organizing strikes, sit-ins, boycotts and publicizing their demands in the form of manifestos, charters and bills of rights.
In fact, a key distinguishing factor between the recent protests and the previous ones is that Iranians have been forming coalitions to advocate for important structural and institutional changes in support of equality, human rights, democracy and freedom.
Over the past two decades, the structures of social communication and public discourse have undergone profound transformations. The digital sphere has become a contested arena and a central space where identities are produced and symbolic and social meanings are shaped. It has also become a place where new subcultures emerge and existing hierarchies are often reinforced. Within this landscape, feminist and political movements have created counter-public spheres that enabled women and marginalized groups to break the monopoly of power over meaning, expose patriarchal violence, and build transnational networks of solidarity.
Such networks helped dismantle the ideological structures that sustained violence and victim-blaming for decades. The broader shifts in societal values unfolded alongside a surge of revolutionary consciousness across the Global South, which exposed the colonial and capitalist structures underpinning political and social life. This awakening was met, however, with intensified surveillance, repression, and the mobilization of power to resist change.
Digital surveillance cannot be understood simply as the use of technology by those in power. It reflects the transformation of the digital sphere itself into a disciplinary apparatus that reproduces colonial and neo-fascist modes of control. Once absorbed into a capitalist ownership structure monopolized by transnational corporations, the internet ceased to be a neutral space for knowledge or communication. It became an infrastructure of domination, where data and algorithms are deployed to sort, control, and exclude.
Algorithmic architectures reinforce hierarchies of language, gender, race, and class. Through mechanisms of digital moderation that reflect the logic of white, masculine, and capitalist privilege, feminist and anti-authoritarian content is systematically excluded. In this way, algorithms have become ideological tools that silence and erase voices deviating from the dominant norms enforced by structures of power.
Despite the progress made during decades of work by women’s rights organizations and democratic institutions, gender equality is still a long way off. There is a growing understanding that gender equality will only be achieved when men and women work together towards full gender equality and equal respect for the rights of all individuals and groups.
This paper presents nine policy and good practice recommendations to support diverse audiences in their work to include men in building a more gender-equal, peaceful, prosperous and democratic world.
Authors: Jennifer Klein, Rachel Vogelstein, and Lauren Hoffman
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the 1995 United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, a watershed moment in the fight for women’s rights, where 189 nations adopted an ambitious Platform for Action to achieve the full and equal participation of women and girls. While the past three decades have produced important gains, this work remains unfinished, and new challenges threaten to reverse progress for women and girls. This report, produced by the Women’s Initiative at Columbia's Institute of Global Politics and GWL Voices, provides an actionable roadmap to advance the full and equal participation of women and girls in the twenty-first century—including in the areas of democracy and human rights, technology, economic participation, and conflict and climate. The report also proposes key levers designed to accelerate the pace of change, including innovative financing, institutional leadership and reform, coalition building, and improved data and research. It concludes with a call to accelerate action towards fulfilling the Beijing Platform and realizing the promise of women’s human rights once and for all.