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High Representative and European Commission Vice President Catherine Ashton formally responds to Saudi women’s Change.org campaigns asking her to support for Saudi women’s right to drive; calls on Saudi Arabia to implement UN anti-discrimination convention.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has called on Saudi Arabia to implement an international women’s rights convention in a letter to Saudi women fighting for the right to drive.

The letter, signed July 6 and received by Saudi Women for Driving on Wednesday, directly calls on Saudi Arabia to implement the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a rare statement of criticism for such a senior diplomat.

International campaign successfully encourages German National Railways (Deutsche Bahn) to withdraw from supportive role in the construction of an Israeli train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem that crosses Palestinian villages in the Occupied Territories.

German National Railways (Deutsche Bahn) has announced that it will no longer participate in the construction of a high-speed Israeli train line from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as the route passes through occupied Palestinian territory yet is intended for the exclusive use of Israeli citizens.

The news comes after an international campaign let by German, Palestinian, and Israeli activists calling on the Deutsche Bahn Group to withdraw from the project, which activists claim violates international law.

The line is set to cut travel time between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to 28 minutes and is scheduled for completion in 2017. Deutsche Bahn was consulting with Israel Railways on the electrification of the route. According to a report in Der Spiegel, Germany’s Federal Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer told Deutsche Bahn CEO that the project was politically “problematic” and violated the “terms of international law.”

Update: BP has now stopped all business with Libya, and growing sanctions may soon stop others as well.

As unrest in Libya grew into full fledged violent clashes, Change.org member Alyssa Kwan saw a crucial chance to make a difference: calling on BP, one of the largest companies doing business with the Gaddafi regime, to suspend operations in Libya.

She launched a concise and effective petition, which quickly gathered more than 2,500 signatures. The UN seemed to agree with the sentiment, imposing sanctions on the current Libyan government and referring several members of the regime to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Earlier this week a group of Libyan activists launched a petiton calling for Malta to grant asylum to two Libyan pilots who defected to the small island nation last Monday. Within 24 hours they had tens of thousands of signatures, more than 1,000 signatures an hour!

Who are these folks?

ENOUGH! Gaddafi is a group of grassroots Libyan activists both inside and outside the country, working together to bring down the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the long time dictator of Libya. Calling themselves a new voice of dissent against the Gaddafi regime, ENOUGH! Gaddafi seeks to utilize grassroots Libyan activism to "promote the ability of the Libyan people to overcome the limitations imposed upon them by an illegitimate and unjust government."

Last week, two Libyan pilots were ordered to bomb civilian protesters by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. They faced an unimaginable choice: bomb their countrymen or face likely execution if they returned without carrying out the attacks. Instead, they found a third option - flying their planes out of Libya and defecting to the nearby island nation of Malta. In doing so, they saved the lives of untold numbers of their fellow Libyans.

But ever since Malta's Refugee Commissioner Mario Guido Friggieri and other government officials have refused to say whether they will give these pilots asylum.

A group of Libyan activists have gathered tens of thousands of signatures in under 24 hours on a petition calling for Malta to grant asylum to two Libyan pilots who defected to the small island nation last Monday.

That's more than 1,000 signatures an hour!

These pilots faced an unimaginable choice: bomb their countrymen or face likely execution if they returned without carrying out the attacks. Instead, they found a third option - flying their Mirage jets out of Libya and defecting to the nearby island nation of Malta.

In doing so, they saved the lives of untold numbers of their fellow Libyans.

But to date the Maltese government has been silent as to the fate of the two pilots, and the decision rests with Malta's Refugee Commissioner Mario Guido Friggieri.

As the White House pushed to pass the Dream Act this month, a number of relevant personal stories have surfaced in support of it.

They’re tales of young adults who arrived in America at a tender age, who grew up here and see this as the only country they’ve known. Yet as they become adults, they lack citizenship and access to the rights they need to become productive people. Fearing deportation or worse, they live in a limbo, not exactly Americans but not anything else either.

While many of these young people would be accepted by their country of origin, there are millions of refugees and immigrants worldwide who exist in a similar No Man’s Land but with no country willing to claim them as their own.

Considered one of the silent global human rights travesties, the predicament of the world’s stateless people is starting to come to prominence with the help of activists, NGOs and refugee groups here in the states.

A stateless person is usually defined as someone who is not legally considered a national by any country. How countries dole out citizenship is how they decide, whether right or wrong, who belongs and who doesn’t, and the stateless peoples of the world are the losers of this arbitration.

There are a variety of ways people become stateless: an ethnic group might be expunged from their home country, discriminatory laws might restrict birth registration, or nationality in a country might be based solely on descent. Without any citizenship, stateless people can claim few basic human rights and are often prone to being exploited by traffickers or treated inhumanely by their host government. They also are often restricted in their access to basic human rights such as health care and education as well as fair employment.

Israel touts itself as the bastion of democracy in the Middle East, a country that will go to bat for freedoms of expression and act as a mainstay against the dictatorships, monarchies and corrupt military regimes that generally characterize the region.

To a degree, this is true. If we are to forget Israel's military control over millions of Palestinians who have absolutely no representation and little legal rights, Israel maintains what is by far the most robust and responsive multi-party democratic political system in the region. Israeli citizens, by in large, are relatively free to say what they want, when they want, in whatever form they want.

But there have been some incredibly worrying signs over the last two years in the erosion of freedoms of expression in Israel. The governing coalition in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, is actively trying to block foreign funding to Israeli human rights groups and non-profits critical of government actions and to require that Arab citizens declare a loath of loyalty to a Jewish state. The parliament has already stripped certain diplomatic privileges of various Arab parliamentarians.

On the streets non-violent protests against Jewish settlement in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah are regularly met with police brutality and in the schools leftist Israeli academics have been explicitly threatened with loosing their positions or tenure.

The Coalition of Women for Peace, a leading Israeli feminist peace organization, is now leading a well-targeted campaign to petition Frank La Rue, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion, to do something about it.

Kakuma, Kenya - Seven Sudanese refugees sit in a circle in a bright room at a former health clinic filling out mock voter registration cards, practicing inking each others' fingers, interviewing one another and roll-playing how to respond to questions community members may have.

For the first time in their lives, 22,000 refugees are about to vote, and these seven will take them through the process.

This week registration booths opened to start collecting the names of eligible voters for a historic referendum on independence for South Sudan scheduled for January 9. As fingerprinted voter cards were issued, there were reports of jubilant scenes unfolding throughout the South.

But will the South Sudan referendum actually take place on January 9?

This is the question on the minds of activists, journalists and analysts covering Sudan. Sudanese officials pledge to not delay, but with less than two months to go, the outstanding logistical and political challenges are significant.

It's been over 100 days since monsoon rains caused some of the worst flooding in Pakistan's history. Sweeping away buildings, people, and precious commodities, the floods left the entire country in a state of catastrophe.

Now, more than three months later, much of Pakistan still remains submerged. In the worst-affected regions, families anxiously await the arrival of boats and aircraft to bring their next meal. According to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), many districts may remain under water for up to six months more.

The Pakistan flooding affected more people than the tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and the Haiti earthquake combined. But the international community has been quite stingy with Pakistan as compared to other similar crises. Though organizations like WFP and UNICEF are working together and alongside other international, national and local organizations to continue to get life-saving aid to those in need, they lack the funding they require to provide emergency services and begin to rebuild the country.