Taraneh and Romina Rahimi were charged with ‘waging war against God’ after joining protests against Tehran regime

The family of 21-year-old twins who have been sentenced respectively to death and decades in jail for protesting against the Iranian regime have appealed to the United Nations for help.

A formal “submission of information” relating to the case of Taraneh and Romina Rahimi has been submitted by British human right lawyers on their family’s behalf.

Modi’s bid to ‘purify’ voter lists has affected a third of the city’s residents. In the GB Road red light district, those who lack permanent homes and documents are among the hardest hit

Rows of hardware and car-part shops line Garstin Bastion Road, with faded signs crammed together above their shutters. By day, the street is one of Old Delhi’s busiest commercial thoroughfares. But as dusk falls, GB Road, as it is known locally, transforms into one of the city’s most notorious red-light districts.

An estimated 2,800 sex workers live and work in brothels that occupy the upper floors of the dilapidated buildings, their entrances tucked behind narrow stairways and unmarked doors. Women sit on plastic stools beneath the stairways, calling out to men passing on the street, while others watch from windows above, their eyes following the movement below before customers are directed upstairs.

Militant feminist led campaigns to legalise abortion and divorce and went on to become foreign minister

Emma Bonino, the radical Italian politician who led campaigns to legalise abortion and divorce against the objections of the Vatican, has died aged 78.

“Today we lose not only our leader but also one of the most clear-sighted, courageous and free figures in the political history of our country,” the small party she founded, More Europe, said on Facebook on Friday.

Her Horizon Fund seeks $100m to stop practice harming 230m women and girls globally

Frontline activists and leaders in the fight against female genital mutilation, which has affected more than 230 million women and girls worldwide, have welcomed an unprecedented $15.5m (£11.4m) fund aimed at creating “unstoppable momentum” to finally end the practice.

The launch of the fund comes as women’s rights are increasingly under attack and donor funding is in sharp decline, particularly for work led by FGM survivors in local communities. It is thought to be the largest single philanthropic contribution to ending the practice of FGM.

Shallah, Fatimah and Maahi are among hundreds of thousands of Afghan women and girls deported from Iran and Pakistan in the past year to a life of severe restrictions

It was a warm summer afternoon on 15 August 2021 when the Taliban entered Kabul and changed the lives of millions. Shallah*, then 16, watched the news at home on the Afghan TV channel Tolo news. She ran crying to the garden, to tell her mother that Afghanistan had fallen.

Her younger sister, Fatimah*, then 11, was at her cousin’s house, where her aunt told her the news. At the time, she says, she did not understand what a takeover meant, or who the Taliban were. Her elder sister, Maahi*, then 22, was well aware of the consequences and remembers her hands shaking at work as she read the news on her phone, on Facebook pages of Afghan news.

They fled a brutal civil war to reach safety in Egypt, but now many Sudanese women and girls are falling prey to sexual exploitation

Sudanese women who fled to Egypt to escape the war in their country are facing increasing levels of sexual exploitation, with the Guardian told of single mothers forced to sell their bodies to survive and feed their children.

Many of the women have not previously worked in Sudan, where conservative social norms dictate that men are usually responsible for financial support. Without established trades or professions, and with their husbands and other family members dead or missing, many female refugees are struggling to pay for food, medical care and rent.

I was told to keep my diagnosis private but I am determined to show the reality of breast cancer and reject the stigma that prevents women seeking treatment

‘Madam, this looks like breast cancer, and if it is, we will chop off your breast.” That was how the doctor welcomed me into the chaotic world of cancer in 2017 when I was 32 years old. He had his back to me, but kept on talking, peering into the specimen bottle.

For a moment, I could no longer hear him. I thought of my three children, the university degree I had just bagged and the future I had envisaged. If I was going to die, what was the point of it all? I had invested everything I had to obtain that degree, subjecting my children to days of absence while I spent my nights in the university library.

Sexual and reproductive services face an uncertain future as the country’s second-largest donor halts support worth hundreds of millions of pounds

The Swedish flag is still flying above the pale blue building overlooking the Atlantic in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, but the doors of the embassy are now closed to visitors. On 31 August, the Swedish embassy in Liberia ends a presence in the country that dates back to 1961.

The billions of kronor of aid that Sweden pipes into the west African country will end on the same day, as sweeping cuts to Swedish development funding come into effect.

There’s growing agreement that under-18s need to be protected – but international turmoil is pushing many towards wedlock

Every minute, 23 girls around the world wed, according to the Girls Not Brides campaign, a coalition of more than 1,000 organisations across 100 countries. No child should be married. But girls are far more likely to be affected than boys, accounting for nine in 10 of those wed before 18, and their spouses are often much older men. The consequences, beyond the immediate threat of sexual violence, include the shortening of their education, increased risks of poverty and domestic abuse, and poor health, including high rates of maternal mortality. In spring, the Center for Global Development thinktank estimated that child marriage costs $175bn annually in lost productivity and increased health risks.

The good news is that the last decade has seen a drop in rates; last year alone, Grenada, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Kuwait and Portugal introduced bans. But there are disturbing signs of regression elsewhere. In May, the Taliban issued a new judicial code enabling child marriage below the previous minimum age of 16, and preventing wives from ending marriages they entered as children if their husbands object. Previous protections were inadequate and often poorly enforced; now even those have been swept away. Activists say forced and early marriages have soared since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, thanks to the ban on secondary education and the state of the economy.

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Five years on, the regime’s chokehold has left Afghan women with almost nothing, but many are still bravely fighting for their freedom

The Taliban did not just ban women from schools, impose the burqa and outlaw smartphones. The Taliban built a system that enslaves nearly half the country’s population, or according to outdated statistics: 21,701,532 women and girls.

In general, the Taliban’s system runs on laws that get changed, forgotten or scrapped as needed to oppress women, such as the abolition of the minimum marriage-age law, which made the only “legitimate” criterion for a girl’s marriage that she has reached puberty or in other words, that she is “fit for consummation”.

Since civil war first reached her village in 2003, Samira has been displaced seven times, enduring devastating losses and injuries along the way

Every morning, she spreads small piles of rice and spices on an aluminium tray in the market of Korsi refugee camp. Some of it comes from her monthly food ration, already meagre, distributed by the UN’s World Food Programme; some she buys when she can and resells for a small profit.

Samira crouches quietly behind her modest display, greeting customers as they pass. Her loose red toub cloth frames her thin face and falls across one side of it, hiding her injured right eye. Every so often she adjusts the long cloth to cover the empty sleeve where her right arm would have been. It is a habit the 33-year-old has developed since the war, but her injuries are only part of the terrible damage it has inflicted.

With less than a third of cycling journeys taken by women, Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, is installing bike lanes, teaching cycling and making sure ‘stereotypes are left behind’

Eliana González has a busy morning ahead of her, dropping off her son at school and picking up groceries. Her trusted vehicle to get around in Bogotá is a colourful cargo bike, adapted to carry her two children and occasionally her dog.

“For me, my cargo bike is a way to carry my children safely and comfortably without polluting the environment,” she says.

Lahore police official says all personnel were responsible for preventing and reporting any wrongdoing at station

The alleged rape of a 20-year-old woman with learning disabilities in a police station in Lahore, Pakistan, has prompted authorities to suspend all 78 police officers and staff at the precinct, in one of the country’s biggest ever disciplinary actions against its police force.

The woman alleges that an assistant sub-inspector apprehended her, took her to Ghaziabad police station and raped her in a room on the second floor. The woman’s family said she disappeared on the street, before returning home in tears and stating that she had been sexually assaulted at the station.

I was the top student in my university class but when the Taliban took Afghanistan again I was forced to marry and my dreams of being a pilot ended

On my last day of school it seemed years of effort were now contained in one small piece of paper. Everyone was happy at graduation, holding our certificates, each of us had a different road ahead. Friends wanted to study medicine, civil engineering or economics. For me, I wanted aviation – to be a pilot.

We worked hard, preparing for Kankor – the university entry exam – then came the first delay. Coronavirus reached Afghanistan. Everywhere went into quarantine, our exams were postponed.

Fatima left her family behind in Morocco for seasonal work in Spain. But the dreams of a better life quickly turned into exploitation, squalid conditions and violence

At the farm in the northwestern Spanish region of Castile and León, a typical day for Fatima* would start at 2am and then stretch late into the night as she carried out tasks that ranged from planting vegetables to herding sheep and cleaning the chicken coop.

After she arrived at the farm, her to-do list gradually lengthened until she was working up to 19 hours a day, seven days a week.

As fighting intensifies in Port-au-Prince, only a fraction of its maternity services remain, and they are under constant threat

Eight months pregnant, Françoise, 45, arrives early in the morning at a deserted school in Bel Air. The hillside neighbourhood in Port-au-Prince has been controlled by gangs since a violent takeover in 2019. Schools have closed, electricity has been cut off and food is scarce. Gunfights can erupt at any time.

Françoise having a Doppler ultrasound in a clinic set up for a few hours inside a deserted school in Bel Air

International law states only military sites can be targeted during conflicts, but this is routinely being ignored

Twice every day, Liubov Martynenko leaves the underground maternity ward where she works in Kherson and travels by ambulance to collect meals from another hospital in the Ukrainian city’s “red zone”, close to the Dnipro River and the Russian forces on the other side.

On 4 June , just before midday, the vehicle entered the grounds of Luchansky city clinical hospital as usual, but Martynenko, who also works as a midwife, heard a strange sound in the air. “It’s flying!” the driver screamed, as she realised there was a drone nearby.