News

An event organized by IDLO to coincide with the 22nd Session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva heard from a great number of participants. Focusing on women’s access to justice, the meeting was supported by the Australian, Austrian and Finnish governments.

In the run-up to International Women’s Day, the Italian senator and veteran feminist talks to IDLO news editor Andre Vornic.

El comercio puede ser una contribución importante para el desarrollo sostenible, pero se necesitan soluciones legales innovadoras que garanticen que los más pobres del mundo accedan de manera justa a sus beneficios, según palabras de Irene Khan, Directora General de la Organización Internacional de Derecho para el Desarrollo (IDLO, por sus siglas en inglés).

There was not much Roman sun, IDLO Director-General Irene Khan observed, to welcome a senior Mongolian delegation earlier this week. But it was still an improvement on the harsh winter of Ulaanbaatar – and indeed, some visitors could be seen enjoying the weather’s relative clemency during a coffee break.

Buying a bar of chocolate, a pack of coffee… Picking this one over that one… “Bananas? Ah yes… Let me see the label… Shall we get those smaller ones?”

In India, a student — still nameless — is fatally gang-raped on a Delhi bus; in Pakistan, teenager Malala Yousafzai is shot in the head for advocating girls’ education; in Afghanistan, a young woman, Lal Bibi, is abducted and raped as payback in a family feud. Elsewhere — countless other women and girls, brutalized, trafficked, denied basic rights, either in law or in practice.

In a bare-bones, underheated court house in snow-bound Issy-Kul, Kyrgyzstan, a woman tells IDLO a story. This story is her own. She tells how, just out of girlhood, she was studying law, away from her village. Once, while on a visit back home, the young woman saw a car pull up. Men jumped out and grabbed her: she was, she knew, being bride-kidnapped.

ROME, 16 January 2013 – Italian Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN Agencies in Rome, Gianni Ghisi, presented his diplomatic credentials to the Director-General of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), Irene Khan, at the organization’s Headquarters in Rome. 

Italy is the Permanent Vice President of the IDLO Assembly of Parties.

“Whenever I visited Mogadishu before, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave the airport,” says IDLO’s Somalia representative in the region, Adam-Shirwa Jama. “These days, it’s a little easier and I can even venture out for meetings”.

IDLO Signals Readiness as Haiti Marks Three Years since Quake

Over the past two years, IDLO’s work in earthquake-hit Haiti has brought home the scale of the reconstruction task. The third anniversary of the tremor, which killed hundreds of thousands, finds the group ready for more hands-on involvement.