Asia and the Pacific

The return to power of Japan’s conservative and hard-line Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on Sunday indicates that voters traded urgently needed social and environmental reforms for traditional male-led leadership, according to analysts here.

If Park Geun-Hye is elected South Korea's first-ever woman president on Wednesday, she will lead a country that is ranked below the likes of Suriname and the United Arab Emirates in gender equality.

South Korea's journey from war-torn poverty to Asia's fourth-largest economy has done little to break the male stranglehold on political and commercial power in what in many ways remains a very conservative nation.

A new report released by the UN says Afghan women are still victims of abuse despite some success by authorities in prosecuting cases of rape, forced marriages and domestic violence.

The UN collected information from 22 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces over a 12-month period ending in September to find out how existing laws protecting women were being implemented.

It is 8.30 a.m. on Saturday in the middle class area of Chandra Nagar. Jagruti Pandya, widow of former Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya, who was murdered in 2003, is doing a walkabout. She is the Gujarat Parivartan Party (GPP) candidate from the posh Ellisbridge constituency, which her late husband represented, and her decision to use this election to focus on the fact that all those charged with her husband’s brutal killing were let off last year, has created a ripple of interest.

Bachelet visited Jakarta for three days earlier this week to give a keynote speech at an Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) ministerial conference on women and development on Tuesday morning.

During her short visit in Jakarta, Bachelet had the opportunity to have discussions with Vice President Boediono, Women Empowerment and Child Protection Minister Linda Amalia Sari, as well as Muslim scholars and members of society.

The Forum on Women, Peace and Security in Afghanistan, 4-6 December 2012, jointly supported by the N-Peace Network and the Research Institute for Women, Peace and Security (RIWPS), was attended by women Members of Parliament and more than 80 women representatives of the Provincial Peace Councils and the High Peace Council from some of the most conflict-ridden parts of the country.

There have been two recent important moments to remember in relation to women’s rights in Southeast Asia: the adoption of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration on Nov. 18 and the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov. 25. In the context of ASEAN, a fundamental issue to be borne in mind is the direction of women’s rights.

In Southeast Asia, progress in women’s rights has been quicker than other human rights, such as political and civil rights.

In the elections sprinkled across Asia from Japan to Indonesia to Sri Lanka this year, perhaps the most intriguing candidate is Park Geun-Hye, who seeks to be the first woman elected president of South Korea.

As she has risen in prominence over the last decade, Ms. Park, 60, has joined an elite sisterhood of Asian women who have gotten their starts on the road to political power as the daughters or widows of well-known men. Most of the women were educated in Western universities either at home or in Europe or the U.S.