UAE among top 5 nations where women's representation is highest, says UN
In the Federal National Council (FNC), women account for 50 per cent of seats, ranking the country 5th along with Andorra.
Out of 40 Federal National Council (FNC) seats, 20 have been reserved for women.
According to Women in Politics: 2025 by the UN, women's representation in the UAE is higher than Western and other GCC countries such as New Zealand (45.5 per cent), Sweden (45 per cent), UK (40.5 per cent), France (36.2 per cent), Germany (35.7 per cent), the US (28.7 per cent), Saudi Arabia (19.9 per cent), Turkiye (19.9 per cent), Japan (15.7 per cent) and India (13.8 per cent) among others.
The study was released on the occasion of International Women's Day, which is marked on the 8th of March.
'Women are the essence of life, its story, and its soul. They are the nurturers of generations and the makers of heroes,' said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, on the occasion of International Women's Day.
The women's role in FNC has increased over the years. In the first FNC elections in 2006, women occupied 22.2 per cent of the total seats.
In 2018, the then-president Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan issued a directive whereby Emirati women must occupy 50 per cent of the FNC seats, 20 each for men and women.
Meanwhile, women account for 20 per cent of ministerial positions in the Cabinet, positioning the country at 100th along with Greece and Timor-Leste, according to the UN.
Globally, Rwanda (63.8 per cent), Cuba (55.7 per cent) Nicaragua (55 per cent) and Mexico (50.2 per cent) have the highest representation of women in unicameral parliaments or lower house of parliament up to January 1, 2025.
The women have the lowest representation, zero per cent, in Oman, Yemen and Tuvalu.
According to the UN, average women representation globally was 27.2 per cent in single or lower house and 27.4 per cent in upper house or senate.
Regionally, the Americas have the highest representation of women at 35.4 per cent in both the houses, followed by Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Pacific and Middle East and North Africa.
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Middle East Eye
43 minutes ago
- Middle East Eye
Israel's plan for 'full control' of Gaza heralds a new Nakba - so the West is panicking
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Life and death It ought to be shocking that Germany has been provoked into stopping its arming of Israel - assuming it follows through - not because of months of images of Gaza's skin-and-bones children that echo those from Auschwitz, but only because Israel has declared that it wants to 'take control' of Gaza. It should be noted, of course, that Israel never stopped controlling Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian territories - in contravention of the fundamentals of international law, as the International Court of Justice ruled last year. Israel has had absolute control over the lives and deaths of Gaza's people every day since its occupation of the tiny coastal enclave many decades ago. But on 7 October 2023, thousands of Palestinian fighters briefly broke out of the besieged prison camp they and their families had endured after Israel momentarily dropped its guard. 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Only as Israel carries through to a logical conclusion its settler-colonial agenda of replacing the native Palestinian people with Jews, is it apparently time for the West to vent its rhetorical 'outrage'. Two-state trickery Why the pushback now? In part, it is because Netanyahu is pulling the rug out from under their cherished, decades-long pretext for supporting Israel's ever-greater criminality: the fabled two-state solution. Israel conspired in that trickery with the signing of the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s. The goal was never the realisation of a two-state solution. Rather, Oslo created a 'diplomatic horizon' for 'final status issues' - which, like the physical horizon, always remained equally distant, however much ostensible movement there was on the ground. Lisa Nandy, Britain's culture secretary, peddled precisely this same deceit last week as she extolled the virtues of the two-state solution. 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But Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, bent over backwards to reassure his examiners, casting as 'sacred' his lightly armed security forces' so-called 'cooperation' with Israel. In reality, they are there to do its dirty work. Nonetheless, despite the PA's endless good behaviour, Israel has continued to expel ordinary Palestinians from their land, then steal that land - which was supposed to form the basis of a Palestinian state - and hand it over to extremist Jewish settlers backed by the Israeli army. Former US President Barack Obama briefly and feebly tried to halt what the West misleadingly calls Jewish 'settlement expansion' - in reality, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians - but rolled over at the first sign of intransigence from Netanyahu. 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Australia announced it would join them this week after its foreign minister, a few days earlier, said the quiet part out loud, warning: "There is a risk there will be no Palestine left to recognise if the international community don't move to create that pathway to a two-state solution." That is something they dare not countenance, because with it goes their alibi for supporting all these years the apartheid state of Israel, now deep into the final stages of a genocide in Gaza. That was why British Prime Minister Keir Starmer desperately switched tack recently. Instead of dangling recognition of Palestinian statehood as a carrot encouraging Palestinians to be more obedient - British policy for decades - he wielded it as a threat, and a largely hollow one, against Israel. He would recognise a Palestinian state if Israel refused to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza and proceeded with the West Bank's annexation. 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Boot on Gaza's neck How does all of this fit with Netanyahu's 'ground offensive'? Israel isn't 'taking over' Gaza, as he claims. Its boot has been on the enclave's neck for decades. While western capitals contemplate a two-state solution, Israel is preparing a final mass ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. Starmer's government, for one, knew this was coming. Flight data shows that the UK has been constantly operating surveillance missions over Gaza on Israel's behalf from the Royal Air Force base Akrotiri on Cyprus. Downing Street has been following the enclave's erasure step by step. Netanyahu's plan is to encircle, besiege and bomb the last remaining populated areas in northern and central Gaza, and drive Palestinians towards a giant holding pen - misnamed a 'humanitarian city' - alongside the enclave's short border with Egypt. Israel will then probably employ the same contractors it has been using elsewhere in Gaza to go street to street to bulldoze or blow up any surviving buildings. Why Gaza's genocide ranks among the gravest horrors of human history Read More » The next stage, given the trajectory of the last two years, is not difficult to predict. Locked up in their dystopian 'humanitarian city', the people of Gaza will continue to be starved and bombed whenever Israel claims it has identified a Hamas fighter in their midst, until Egypt or other Arab states can be persuaded to take them in, as a further 'humanitarian' gesture. Then, the only matter to be settled will be what happens to the real estate: build some version of Trump's gleaming 'Riviera' scheme, or construct another tawdry patchwork of Jewish settlements of the kind envisioned by Netanyahu's openly fascist allies, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. There is a well-established template to be drawn on, one that was used in 1948 during Israel's violent creation. Palestinians were driven from their cities and villages, in what was then called Palestine, across the borders into neighbouring states. The new state of Israel, backed by western powers, then set about methodically destroying every home in those hundreds of villages. Over subsequent years, they were landscaped either with forests or exclusive Jewish communities, often engaged in farming, to make Palestinian return impossible and stifle any memory of Israel's crimes. Generations of western politicians, intellectuals and cultural figures have celebrated all of this. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former Austrian President Heinz Fischer are among those who went to Israel in their youth to work on these farming communities. Most came back as emissaries for a Jewish state built on the ruins of a Palestinian homeland. An emptied Gaza can be similarly re-landscaped. But it is much harder to imagine that this time the world will forget or forgive the crimes committed by Israel - or those who enabled them. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
The National
4 hours ago
- The National
France, UK and Germany willing to reimpose sanctions on Iran
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Khaleej Times
4 hours ago
- Khaleej Times
Renowned Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim dies at 88
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