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Tens of thousands of people marched and protested across the globe Wednesday on International Women's Day to highlight the sometimes lethal inequalities that have made women second-class citizens all over the world.
Topping the agenda were the struggle to delegitimize violence against women in the developing world, and to protect abortion rights in countries with more established gender equality, especially the United States and European countries such as Poland and Italy.
Women's rights activists on every continent spoke of gains made in access to political power, pointing to the recent arrival of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia as Africa's first elected woman head of state, and the precedent-setting victory in Chile of President Michelle Bachelet.
Government cabinets split evenly between the sexes in Sweden and Spain -- despite the latter's social conservatism -- are further signs of progress.
But they also pointed to the huge, persistent gaps that have made women suffer compared to, and sometimes at the hands of, men.
These disparities were brought into sharp relief in Multan, Pakistan, where some 3,000 people, mainly women, attended a rally Wednesday led by 33-year-old Mukhtaran Mai, whose gang-rape on the orders of a rural tribal council triggered an international outcry.
"I will continue my struggle to end the oppression of women," Mai, flanked by a dozen other gang-rape victims, told the crowd as it chanted "Give equal rights to women!" and "Treat women with respect!".
"I have come here so we can raise our voices together," said Mai, whose campaign to expose her country's tolerance of socially-sanctioned violence against women has proven deeply embarrassing to Pakistan's leaders.
Mai was gang-raped on the orders of a tribal council in a rural village in Punjab province in 2002 as punishment for her brother's alleged affair with a woman from another tribe.
Partly as a result of the attention her case has drawn, activists say, President Pervez Musharraf -- who earlier barred Mai from travelling to the United States to address a human rights group -- signed into law a bill introducing the death penalty for "honor killings."
In the United States the country was plunged into a bitter dispute this week after the governor of South Dakota signed a law criminalizing abortion in all cases -- including rape and incest -- unless the the life of the mother is in danger.
The action has outraged women's rights groups and poses a direct legal challenge that could result in the overturning of the 1973 landmark Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America said it "will fight these attacks in courts, in the state houses, at the ballot boxes to ensure that women with their doctors and families continue to be able to make personal health care decisions without government interference," said the organization's president Cecile Richards.
Some 10 states, with Mississippi in the forefront, are considering approving a law similar to South Dakota's.
Events in Poland this week showed that Europe is not immune to the legal debate over abortion rights either.
A woman whose vision became severely impaired after she was refused an abortion in staunchly Catholic Poland took her fight to the European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday, paving the way for a legal challenge to the country's highly restrictive abortion laws.
Alicja Tysiac, 35, a single mother from Warsaw, argues that doctors' refusal to terminate her pregnancy amounted to infringement on her private life, inhuman and degrading treatment, and discrimination on the basis of her sex and disability.
"Poland has not protected her and today she is almost blind," Tysiac's lawyer told the court's judges.
Abortion, which was widely available during the communist era, is illegal in Poland except when the health of the mother or unborn child is threatened.
Women's rights activists in Poland also drew attention Wednesday to the scourge of forced prostitution, sayihg that up to 10,000 Polish women fall victim to international human trafficking networks every year.
La Strada, a non-governmental organization that provides help for victims of trafficking, said the problem has grown since the EU expanded in 2004 to take in 10 new members that, like Poland, are mostly former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe.
"We estimate that around 15,000 women from these (former Soviet) states pass through Poland every year," she added.
La Strada is supporting a prevention and awareness campaign launched Wednesday by the European Parliament on International Women's Day.
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AFP 081609 GMT 03 06
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