News headlines in November 2009, page 4

Nigeria ratified the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1985 without reservations. But few of its citizens have ever heard of the document. Day-to-day life for women in Nigeria is shaped less by international conventions than it is by the diverse cultures, traditions and religions found in the country.

Mauritania formally adopted the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in 2001, but in the eight years since, it has had limited effect on the status of women.

More than seven months after the Cape High Court ruled in favour of the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT), interdicting the police for harassment and arrests, sex workers are losing the daily battles against police and criminal elements on the streets.

'I would ask the chamber to release me. Thank you.'

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) ended one of Africa's longest and complex civil wars, with nominal agreement reached on security, wealth sharing, and governance issues. But there are renewed fears that conflict could erupt again in the country as divisions between the north and the south deepen.

‘Angry’ is not the adjective that comes to mind when you first meet Nelly Damaris Chepkoskei.

'We have been here since four in the morning, my baby is tired,' says Melisia Shinedhimha (24) outside the polling station in Okuruyangava, one of Windhoek’s poorest townships.

Even after he cast his vote in Wednesday's referendum, Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves was still singing the praises of the new constitution that the St. Vincent and the Grenadines parliament had passed by a two-thirds majority last month.

Thousands of pages of declassified U.S. documents shedding light on the 1989 murders of six prominent Jesuit clerics, their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter in El Salvador could give a new twist to the case that opened in the Spanish courts in January.

Despite major advances in land distribution in Bolivia, single, widowed and undocumented women in this South American country have little chances of owning rural lands due to the patriarchal traditions and customary practices of indigenous peoples, in violation of international instruments and conventions protecting women’s rights.