Early in my tenure as Secretary General at the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), I traveled with a small group of women to some forty towns and villages around Iran. We wanted to find out what would be most useful to the women themselves. What were their priorities? What were their most important challenges and…
Category: Publications – Articles
Women’s Learning Partnership’s Project on Family Law Reform to Challenge Gender-Based Violence
An international network of 20 autonomous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) based primarily in transitioning and fragile states, Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP) is dedicated to enhancing universal human rights and gender equality, strengthening civil society, and empowering women to be active citizens and actors of change in their societies. Our mission is…
Women’s Human Rights: From Global Declarations to Local Implementation
Introduction Since the adoption of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the effect of international conferences, laws, resolutions, and consequent documents on rights on the struggle for women’s human rights at regional, national, and local levels has been a matter of debate and controversy. In my view, they have been and…
Trespassing With Fatema
Fatema and I began our work together in 1984 as contributors to Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. She wrote the Morocco chapter and I, Iran’s. We stayed in touch through the Sisterhood Is Global Institute that Robin founded with the seventy writers of the book, but we did not meet…
A Personal Remembrance of Fatema Mernissi
Fatema Mernissi, the Moroccan sociologist widely known as a pioneer in Middle Eastern Women’s studies, passed away this week. It is difficult for me to speak of her – a friend, ally, and colleague of over two decades – in the past tense. I first met Fatema at the Middle East Studies Association Conference in…
The World We Seek: Human Rights in the 21st Century
Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP) began as an idea at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Witnessing the enthusiasm and energy with which 35,000 NGO representatives reviewed the status of women’s rights around the globe and discussed strategies for achieving full rights for women, a group of…
Iranian Women's Voices
In the flood of news and information that surrounds us every day, we may take for granted the constant ripple of voices around the globe whose struggle to be heard often ends in violence, imprisonment or death. Ironically, it is only the new information age that is allowing many of those voices to be heard…
Reflections on Women’s Security in Iran
The late Mhabub ul Haq, the founder of the UN Human Development Report, captured the essence of human security when he said, and I quote, “In the last analysis, human security means a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, an ethnic tension that did not explode, a dissident who was…