MANAMA, 11 January 2005 — 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. 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.

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.

“Violence and discrimination is a vicious circle that feeds on each other and to break that circle we need to address both issues at the same time,” she said. She added that the GCC women had achieved a lot in a number of fields in recent years, but a lot still needed to be done. Close to 60 activists from women’s groups, human rights activists, lawyers, judges, academics and even some government officials from the six GCC states and Yemen took part in the conference which is part of Amnesty’s six-year global campaign, Stop Violence Against Women, launched in March 2003.

Participants urged governments to review existing laws on nationality, housing, social security or introduce new legislation to ensure equality and nondiscrimination. They also called on the GCC governments to provide housing facilities to women who face violence, and to create hot lines linked to various institutions that offer protection to such women.