Contributed by: Yuliya Gureyeva, Azerbaijan National VAW Monitor

By Alyona Myasnikova

Women’s Human Rights are still one of the most challenged issues on the global agenda and in international law. “Women’s issues” nowadays appears as a main thread either in humanitarian law and international war crimes or specific dimensions of human rights as connected with respect to gender identity.

The 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence is an international campaign starting on November 25, the International Day Against Violence Against Women and finishing on December 10, International Human Rights Day. These significant dates symbolically link violence against women and human rights to emphasize that such violence is a violation of human rights.

However, the International Declaration of Human Rights did not contain any reservations on gender-based violence and only in 1981 was the UN Declaration on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women adopted and the position of Special Reporter on Violence against Women under the UN Human Rights Committee established.

Women’s organizations use various methods to reveal the facts and attract attention to the problems, to monitor changes and work out preventive strategies. Women try to use new technological developments to create and improve mechanisms to combat violence against women in a new era of technocracy.

One of the successful attempts to turn informational technologies for women’s services was in the creation of the internet-portal “Stop Violence against Women” (www.stopvaw.org).

This website was created as a tool to enhance women’s rights protection in Central and Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union countries. STOPVAW presents information and advocacy tools in four main directions: family violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment and trafficking.

The representative of this website in Azerbaijan is the Azerbaijan Gender Information Center. The Azerbaijan country page was updated with materials on women’s rights protection in Azerbaijan, country news, NGO reports, list of all laws and legal documents related to gender-based violence, list of all International Conventions joined by Azerbaijan and periodical reports.

Within its short history this portal has become an international forum helping in getting and exchanging information, building up coalitions, promoting human rights and reaching progress on the level of legal initiatives. 

Cited in: Myasnikova, Alyona, "Campaign Against Gender-Based Violence," Zerkalo, 17 November 2005.

Article reprinted with the permission of “Zerkalo” newspaper.

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