Iraq

BAGHDAD, Jan 16 2013 (IPS) - From full literacy declared in the seventies, Iraq is down to 40 percent literacy for women. From the first woman prime minister and the first woman judge in the Middle East in 1959, Iraq has slipped to a place where an abnormal number of widows struggle, and where child marriages are on the rise. Hanaa Edwar is putting up a fight to win Iraqi women their freedoms again.

Q: What kind of work does your organisation do to protect women rights?

A female journalist working for the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency was shot dead in the northern city of Mosul Thursday, police said, becoming the second VOI reporter killed in a week.
For more information, please visit the Middle East Times Website.

The Women's Union of Kurdistan in Sulaimaniyah said it recorded 83 women burning themselves in the first six months of last year; 95 in the first half of 2007.
To read the full article, please visit the Middle East Times Website.

A decision was reached today that the Iraqi provincial elections law will contain a 25 percent quota for women.

A little more than two weeks before Iraq’s provincial elections, there is widening anger that the published version of the election law has only a weak provision to set aside seats for women. Early versions of the law, which governs the election of Iraq’s 18 provincial councils, included a firm guarantee that women would have at least 25 percent of the seats — the same percentage mandated by the Constitution for the numbers of women in Parliament.

Women candidates are facing an uphill struggle in Saturday's provincial elections in strongly conservative Muslim Iraq. In other areas, posters with photos of women have been pulled down, prompting one candidate on the Iraqi Teachers' List in the province of Diwaniyah, Hanaa Kazem, to complain to the electoral commission.
To read the full article, please visit Middle East Online.

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) today opened a conference entitled “Still Paying the Price, Iraqi Women after Years of Wars, Sanctions and Internal Conflict” on strategies to promote women’s rights in Iraq. The two day conference is organized through the UNAMI Human Right’s Office and attended by several high-level Iraqi officials, including the Acting Minister of Women’s Affairs, the Kurdistan Regional Government Minister of Justice and the Vice President of the European Union Parliament.

Iraq's next general election will be held on Jan. 30, the deputy parliament speaker said Monday.

16 Mar 2012 - The Arab Spring continues to blow winds of change in the Middle East. There is no doubt the direction these countries are heading in will affect Arab societies and personal rights. But recently, the focus has been on women in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.