Posts tagged : "Women rights"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s Guardian Council, the powerful body in charge of electoral oversight, caught the public by surprise by announcing that women may run for the presidency in the 2021 polls that will decide the successor to Hassan Rouhani. Some women’s rights activists welcomed the announcement as a harbinger of change in a highly conservative, patriarchal society. Others suggested the gesture was grandstanding by the government to draw more voters to the ballot box and polish its image. More than 60% of university students in Iran are female. Some of the country’s most brilliant authors, academicians, scientists, artists, philanthropists and media personalities are women. Global examples are 2003 Nobel...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s all-male Guardian Council, after four decades of barring women from the presidency, has reversed course to allow women to run in 2021. The step has been largely welcomed as a positive sign by women’s rights advocates, although the constitutional watchdog tasked with overseeing Iran’s electoral process screens all candidates’ eligibility for elected government positions. In a press conference on October 10, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesperson of the ultra-conservative body, which operates under the aegis of the Supreme Leader, surprised reporters by saying there was no prohibition on women running for the presidency in next year’s elections. No explicit legal provision blocked...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: A tidal wave of shocking revelations made by Iranian women about their experiences with sexual abuse and harassment has overwhelmed social media platforms in recent days, as calls for busting taboos on speaking out about rape and abuse in a conservative society have given impetus to a Persian-language #MeToo moment. The names of several prominent Iranian artists, university professors, TV personalities and even parliamentarians and government officials are implicated in the new disclosures, and allegations are floating around public figures who were long presumed to be decent individuals. One of the first allegations was made by Sara Omatali, a former journalist and now an educator based in the...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: Invisible Women of the Middle East: True Stories is a 2018 book by Moroccan author Sana Afouaiz, exploring the deepest layers of women’s lives across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region under the shadow of patriarchal culture. The book, which narrates true stories based on the life of several women in different MENA countries whom the author interviewed during her trips to these nations, illustrates how women grapple with misogyny and discrimination in various forms, and how gender realities are shaped across the region. Afouaiz is a gender expert and public speaker on women issues in the Middle East and North Africa, who touches upon a number of themes in her book and depicts the...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Thanks to a royal decree, Saudi women will be allowed to drive cars and motorbikes beginning in June this year. The decision to give the women in Saudi Arabia the right to drive was announced in September 2017 by King Salman and is considered a major step in the course of the normalisation of life in Saudi Arabia, a highly-conservative kingdom in which women have very limited rights and almost no representation in major decision-makings. A patriarchal society in which women are sometimes even treated as commodities with no role to play in social and political walks of life, Saudi Arabia has been incomprehensibly resistant to such changes as giving women the right to drive. Saudi Arabia...

It's the International Women's Day (#IWD2018). It's an important occasion, recognised by the United Nations and gives all those who enshrine this occasion or celebrate it some reasons to think of certain dynamics. There are many brilliant women across the world who are working hard to overcome certain difficulties to make their societies better and have their voice heard: fighting myopia being emitted by those who think confining a dynamic, entrepreneurial and creative population in their ability to make positive, useful contribution to their society makes them unable to make more positive contributions to the kitchen, in household; fighting intolerance by the inflexible, uneducated and undemocratic leaders who need women when it...