Woman march across the world

Women march as rights under threat across the world. Image: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images

Women across the globe march on International Women’s Day

The protests will focus on the fight against France’s deeply-unpopular pension reform which critics say is unfair to women.

Woman march across the world

Women march as rights under threat across the world. Image: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images

On Wednesday women across the world will hit the streets to defend rights that are coming under increasing attack.

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PROTEST TO MARK INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

To mark International Women’s Day, capitals across the world are hosting marches, rallies, and demonstrations. This includes Madrid, where the streets are regularly packed with a sea of purple, a colour often associated with women’s rights.

People believe that there are many reasons to protest, with Iran’s repression of the Mahsa Amini protests, new US restrictions on abortion rights, and the Ukraine war’s impact on them, to name a few.

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“Women’s rights are being abused, threatened, and violated around the world,” he added, pointing to Afghanistan, where “women and girls have been erased from public life,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said.

RIGHTS ‘VANISHING BEFORE OUR EYES’

Global progress on women’s rights is “vanishing before our eyes,” Guterres warned on Monday. He added that gender equality would take another three centuries to achieve. Afghan universities reopened on Monday after a winter break, but only men returned to classes. The Taliban authorities banned them from higher education.

On the evening of International Women’s Day, the European Union imposed sanctions on individuals and entities deemed to be responsible for violence and rights abuses.

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The Taliban’s higher education minister Neda Mohammad Nadeem was sanctioned for depriving women of university learning.

The sanctions also targeted officials from five other countries — Iran, Russia, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Syria.

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CAPITALS WHERE PROTESTS WILL TAKE PLACE

In London, the Madame Tussauds museum will mark the day by unveiling a new waxwork of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst. Demonstrations have been banned everywhere else.

In Pakistan, the authorities have blocked a march in the eastern city of Lahore over the “controversial” nature of the banners waved by participants who addressed subjects like divorce, sexual harassment, and menstruation.

“We are fighting against a patriarchy… that fights ad nauseam against rights — such as the right to abortion — that we have won through struggle,”