I found out today that this week is International Women's Week, and that the official day for Internation Women's Day is March 8. I had never heard of this before but I read about it in the newspaper this morning. In the past, refugees had to demonstrate that the persecution that they faced was linked to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. In 1985 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees urged governments to develop national guidelines on the issue of women asylum-seekers who face harsh or inhuman treatment due to their having trangressed the social mores of the society in which they live. In 1993 Canada was the first to respond. Therefore, this is a particularily exciting year for Canada as it marks the 10th anniversary of the guidelines. This peaked my interested, and so I decided to take a look on google to see what I could find about the issue. It turns out that the theme for International Women's Day for 2003 is World-Wide Women (WWW): Surfing the Digital Revolution! This theme encourages Canadians to take a closer look at the impact of information and communication technologies on women and their use as a tool to empower women and to promote women's equality. Pretty cool....