By: Vivian Jebet Police officers in Isiolo County have been trained to be responsive to gender-based violence cases as the country heads for elections. The training organized by Isiolo Peace Link centered on creating awareness, crime prevention, better case handling and appropriate response to violence cases by Administration and Regular Police officers. “Police officers interact with communities on a daily basis, it is important to use the community-police partnership to combat GBV,” she said. The agency’s County Coordinator Abdia Mohammud said the training – which focused on women and children rights – will help tackle abuses that are rife in the region. Ms. Mohammud decried that women and children are vulnerable, calling on institutions charged with addressing GBV cases to formulate strict measures to end the vice. “Women in some parts of the region have been directed by their spouses to vote for an individual, this is against their democratic…

Hong Kong’s first female chief executive-to-be has broken the city’s highest glass ceiling, illustrating how far Hong Kong women have come, but also how far they still have to go. Enabling more women to work and making jobs gender-neutral are crucial in tackling demographic challenges and transitioning to a more sophisticated service- and technology-driven economy. An ageing population and low fertility rates pose a demographic time bomb. Hong Kong has one of the world’s worst gender imbalances, but just 51 percent of its women are in the workforce. Studies in Japan and Canada show closing the workplace gender gap could boost annual GDP by 5 to 13 percent. For Hong Kong, this could mean ­HK$100 billion or more a year. More women in the workforce also relate to increased birth rates, as in Sweden and the UK, where paid parental leave and flexible schedules keep mothers working as they build a family. This boosts…

By: Samuel Osborne The UK stabbed activists campaigning for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia in the back by allegedly voting for the country to join the UN Commission for Women’s Rights, a woman who was arrested for “driving while female” has said. Manal al-Sharif made history in 2011 by filming a video of her driving in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom and posting it on YouTube, where it got over 700,000 views in one day. As a result of the video, she was arrested and spent a week in prison for the offence of “driving while female”. She accused the UK and other democratic governments who reportedly voted for Saudi Arabia to join the UN Commission for Women’s Rights of damaging the struggle to end the country’s guardianship scheme. “They didn’t confirm or deny, but we know that UK voted for Saudi Arabia to be in the UN commission for women’s…

The US Supreme Court on Monday struck down a gender distinction in US immigration law that treats mothers and fathers differently when determining a child’s citizenship, calling such inequality “stunningly anachronistic.” The high court, in an 8-0 ruling authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, found that a provision in federal law that defines how people born overseas can be eligible for US citizenship violated the US Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. The ruling, however, may not help the man who brought the case, New York resident Luis Morales-Santana, who was seeking to avoid deportation to the Dominican Republic after being convicted of several offences. The law requires that unwed fathers who are American citizens spend at least five years living in the United States – a 2012 amendment reduced it from 10 years – before they can confer citizenship to a child born abroad, out of wedlock and to a partner…

Peru’s minister for women has denounced the impunity that surrounds crimes of gender violence, which she says has placed the country among the world’s most dangerous places for women. “There are discretion and impunity in the justice system that makes it necessary to strengthen the entire system involved in a complaint, from the police officer to the judges,” the Minister for Women and Vulnerable Populations, Ana Maria Romero-Lozada, said in an interview with EFE over the weekend. “We don’t want to send a lot of people to jail, but if someone must go, then he should go. We have to apply the law as it’s written,” she added. The ministry issued a recent report that revealed a 26 percent surge in complaints about gender violence in the first four months of this year — a total of 2,415 — compared with the same period last year. According to Romero-Lozada, this…

Saudi Arabia has re-arrested women’s rights campaigner Loujain al-Hathloul, who is best known for her defiance of the kingdom’s driving ban. Ms Al-Hathloul was detained at King Fahad International Airport in Dammam on the country’s east coast near the border with Bahrain on 4 June and is expected to be taken to Riyadh for questioning by the Bureau of Investigation and Prosecution. She has had no access to a lawyer and has not been allowed to contact her family, Amnesty International reported. The exact reason for her arrest has not been made public but Amnesty said they believe it is due to her human rights activism in the country. The 27-year-old is most famous for defying the kingdom’s ban on female drivers after attempting to drive into Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates. Following the stunt, she was arrested and detained by the Saudi authorities for 73 days. She…

As a humanitarian and political crisis in neighbouring Venezuela deepens, a growing number of Venezuelan women are working in bars and brothels across Colombia. “I didn’t do this in Venezuela. I never ever imagined I’d be doing this in Colombia,” said Maria, who declined to give her real name, to Reuters. She charges $17 for 15-minutes of sex, and the money earned is spent on buying medicine for her mother who has cancer. For the past year, she has travelled back and forth from Bogota to Venezuela’s capital Caracas every 90 days, before her tourist visa expires, carrying medicine, food, and soap. “I’m ashamed I have to do this. It’s a secret,” said Maria, 26, who has told her family she is a travelling salesperson. Venezuelan migrants are often lured by false promises of well-paid work in Colombia’s restaurants and bars or as domestic workers. But then they find they…