By: Anna Arutunyan Women in this ultra-conservative region have long suffered repressive conditions because of strict Muslim doctrine practiced here. Now they face a new threat: pressure to reunite with divorced husbands in the name of family values. A commission dominated by religious leaders in the autonomous Russian republic of Chechnya convened over the summer with the goal of bringing estranged couples back together. More than 1,000 divorced couples have been reunited so far, even though some may have been in abusive relationships. “We’ve got to wake people up, talk to them, and explain. We’ve got to return the women who left their husbands and reconcile them,” Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic, told local media. Heda Saratova, a human rights activist who has become loyal to Kadyrov, defends the move even though its objective is to persuade women back into marriages they had chosen to leave. “They are trying to tell us that…

South Korea has approved an $8m (£5.9m) aid package for North Korea, in a humanitarian gesture at odds with calls by Japan and the US for unwavering economic and diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang. The country’s unification ministry agreed to provide the funds, which will go towards programmes for infants and pregnant women, days after the UN Security Council agreed to another round of sanctions in response to the regime’s recent nuclear test. The ministry, which oversees cross-border relations, said humanitarian aid to impoverished North Korea should remain unaffected by rising political tensions on the peninsula. According to the ministry, the aid package did not include cash payments, and there was “realistically no possibility” that it could be of any use to the North Korean military. South Korea’s unification minister, Cho Myung-gyon, said the government had “consistently said we would pursue humanitarian aid for North Korea in consideration of the poor…

Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, will from Monday, September 25, play host to rural women farmers from more than 15 countries on the continent. Delegates are expected from Ghana, Senegal, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Rwanda. Other countries expected to attend are; Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Gambia, and Cameroun. ActionAid Nigeria is hosting the program under its Rural Women Farmers Forum (RWFF), which is a leadership capacity building training and planning meeting. Reports state that the Abuja meeting is under the Public Financing of Agriculture (PFA) project which is currently in its second phase. According to the document, the project “is aimed at catalyzing increased quantity and quality of public investment in agriculture in order to increase the productivity and well-being of women smallholder farmers, their households and communities in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.” It also added that it is “to solidify, leverage, and enhance the impact of…

Saudi Arabia has invited women to a sports stadium for the first time to attend the annual national day celebrations with their families, state media recently. Families will be allowed into the King Fahd stadium in Riyadh, used mostly for football matches, and seated separately from single men to mark the kingdom’s 87th National Day this weekend. “The stadium is ready to receive about 40,000 people divided between individuals and families to be seated separately,” the official Saudi Press Agency said in a statement, citing the general authority of entertainment. This marks a shift from previous celebrations in the kingdom where women are effectively barred from sports arenas by strict rules on segregation of the sexes in public. Saudi Arabia has some of the world’s tightest restrictions on women and is the only country where they are not allowed to drive. Under the country’s guardianship system, a male family member…

Protests are being planned at urinals across Amsterdam over the lack of female public toilet facilities after a judge criticized a woman for not using public male toilets after getting caught short on the streets of the city. Geerte Piening, 23, was fined after she asked her friends to cover for her as she urinated off a street on a night out in Amsterdam’s Leidseplein district. Amsterdam has 35 public urinals for men and only three public toilets for women. It was past the closing time of local bars, and Piening was a couple of kilometers from the nearest women’s toilet facilities. Piening decided to fight the charges in court, only to be criticized by the judge who said that despite the lack of toilets available for women she should have made use of the facilities made available to men. “It would not be pleasant but it can be done,”…

A new women-only transport service launching in Paris aims to tackle the problem of sexual harassment and assault in taxi cabs. For many women taking a taxi isn’t always the stress-free option for getting from A to B that it should be, and Paris is no exception. But a new company launching in the French capital is hoping to make that a thing of the past. Women drive promises transport without “indiscreet looks, delicate questions, or ambiguous proposals”. It also promises a luxury experience, with concierge and personal shopper services offered in addition to standard drivers, and water bottles, makeup kits, and computer tablets in each car. The goal of the service is to “prove that transporting people is not a profession reserved for men and that women have the right to be transported in peace,” founder Sarra Boubchir told Le Figaro. She said the inspiration for the startup came…