News stories by Melanie Haider

A chair stood empty at the launch here Monday of a report on the repression of human rights defenders, a physical reminder that its would-be occupant - Ales Bialiatski, president of Human Rights Centre Viasna in Belarus — has been languishing in prison since August.

Ninety percent of the non-governmental organisations in Mexico are founded and run by women, says journalist and women's rights activist Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, making them primary targets of violence, including spillover from Mexico's escalating drug wars.

In the last decade, more than two million children have died as a result of armed conflicts and over one million have been orphaned or separated from their families. Yet for children affected by wars, these costs are only a few of the high costs children pay, says the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF).

Land degradation threatens populations and their livelihoods, driving food insecurity and decreasing productivity. Yet no comprehensive action has been taken to address this issue, and if none is taken now, degradation and all of its serious implications for the future will skyrocket, says a new study.

If women farmers were given more tools and resources, the number of hungry in the people in the world could be slashed by 100 to 150 million.

Brothers, husbands, boyfriends and fathers are key actors in the creation of a world where girls enjoy the same rights as boys, and will themselves benefit from greater gender equality, stresses a new report from Plan International released Thursday.

Less than 10 percent of the world's political leaders are female, according to United Nations figures, but many of them were present Monday at U.N. headquarters in New York, where they reiterated calls for increased participation for women as critical to both economic development and democracy.

With Fashion Week under way in New York, Milan and London, more than 60 apparel companies from the United States and Europe this week publicly pledged to not knowingly buy cotton that has been harvested by children forced to labour in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan.

In a new curriculum introduced last December, thousands of students in New York State are learning about modern-day human rights defenders, and that they too can make a positive difference in the world.