gender equality

What’s the role of the police in a community? Is it to serve the citizens by ensuring their security or to maintain public order by coercive power?

 Lawyers, human rights activists, journalists and citizen-based groups deliberated over these vital questions on Monday in a seminar where they presented a draft of the Sindh Police Act 2014, a preliminary dossier based on the aspirations of the citizens in the province and drafted by legal experts. 

In late March, Raveela Gangula rallied a dozen women to stop a drunken man from savagely beating his wife in Muthangi, a village in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Although they restrained him and called the police, he was released that evening without charges.

“The police should have locked him up for at least a week and scared him from ever touching another woman like that again,” Gangula said. “The government does not support us.”

On the occasion of Women’s Day in Iran, Iran’s president and supreme leader presented contrasting roles in society for women. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has previously rebuked President Hassan Rouhani’s cultural policies, but this appears to be the first time that the president has contradicted the supreme leader in an area that the two have consistently clashed.

Khyber Pakhtunkhawa Chief Minister Pervez Khattak has announced that women police desks would be established at all 500 police stations of the province to facilitate the province’s female population.

Speaking at a ceremony in the provincial capital city, Khattak announced the establishment of Model Police Stations at Gulbahar, Faqirabad and UniversityTown areas under a pilot project which would be later extended to other police stations across the province.

A group of around 800 Moroccans, mostly women, staged a march in the capital Rabat on Sunday demanding that a constitutional guarantee of gender equality be applied in the kingdom.

The march from the city centre to parliament was led by the Civil Coalition for the Application of Article 19, which is reportedly made up of some 500 NGOs, and was joined by civil society organisations, lawmakers, rights groups and lawyers.