The situation for women in the Middle East is a complicated issue, and it's multi-layered. If we look at the countries that have some stability—and the definition of stability is also complicated in this region—we can see how some of the laws and regulations have been advanced, but without mechanisms to implement them. We can see now that we have a progressive law for combatting violence against women in Tunisia, for example. It is written, but it's not implemented on the ground, based on different things. There are also attacks on women human rights defenders in countries like Tunisia and on the one who created this law in Tunisia while she was a parliamentarian.
We have a system of countries that mainly have wars and conflicts, and we can see how sexual violence, rape and gang rape have not only increased but also been weapons of war, as in what's happening in Sudan. What's happening in Sudan is one of the most outrageous things happening to women without, of course, local mechanisms. The international system is failing the Sudanese women big time.
We can also see other countries that have had some opening, such as the gulf countries. They did some of the opening in certain things, but the holistic approach is still not implemented.
We can see that the economic participation of women is one of the main barriers for women in legal systems, especially in private life and in combatting violence against women. However, we can see some advancement in the public sphere. Some countries, like Egypt, now have more female judges, but at the same time, we still don't have some of the laws and regulations that protect women. How to bring women's issues to the status of not being more tokenism than full empowerment is a hard thing. With regard to the conflict, actual violence, rape and gang rape are the most outrageous things that women from this region have been facing.