 Amnesty International (AI) and human rights activists from the region urged the GCC governments to play a more active role to help stop violence and discrimination against women, calling for the establishment of a regional center to address the issue.
| Yeah. That'll do it. We'll just talk and talk. That'll stop the violence. |
They also called for the adoption of new laws that criminalize acts of violence against women and for existing laws that protect the rights of women to be enforced.
| That and the credible threat of a .38 vasectomy. |
The call came during a press conference held yesterday at the end of the two-day "End Violence and Discrimination Against Women in the GCC" conference in Manama.
AI Middle East program member, Dina El-Mamoun, who researched and carried out a field survey of GCC laws and the situation women face in five of the GCC countries said that there was discrimination against women particularly in laws concerning nationality, passports, and housing. "These are some of the apparent cases of discrimination against women we found in laws we reviewed, but there is also the discrimination where officials fail to enforce laws that are there to protect women," she said. El-Mamoun added that there is no exact figure available of women who suffer from violence in the region, but said that the field study and interviews with GCC officials revealed that the number was high. |