Geneva ? The failure by governments across the Islamic world to respect women’s rights has hampered steps toward political change, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi said Monday as the United Nations observed International Women’s Day.

In New York, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan marked the occasion with a warning that a growing number of the world’s new HIV/AIDS cases are women and that widely used prevention measures are ill-equipped to halt the pattern.

Ebadi, who last year became the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, said women had raised their profile on the international stage over the past decade, but more needs to be done.

“Many people use Islam to justify the unequal position of women. They are wrong,” the Iranian lawyer said during a visit to the International Labor Organization. “Islam is a religion which believes in the equality of all human beings.”

Women in Iran face an easier situation than in hardline Saudi Arabia, but still needs permission from a husband to work, travel or divorce, Ebadi said.

President Bush issued a statement championing the efforts of Ebadi and a fellow Nobel laureate, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. He also said the U.S.-led toppling of regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan was a step forward in advancing women’s rights.

“The best guarantor of the rights of women is freedom and democracy,” Bush said.

In New York, Annan urged governments to fight the sexual abuse and other factors that put women at risk of getting the HIV — the virus that causes AIDS.

A decade ago, more men were infected with the virus than women. But within the last six years the percentage of the world’s female HIV/AIDS patients has gone from 41 percent to 50 percent. In sub-Saharan Africa, 58 percent of those with the virus or the disease are women.

Female inmates attend a fashion show organized inside the San Vittore prison in Milan, Italy. The show was given Monday on the occasion of International Women's Day. This design was created by prisoners.

Around the world, people marked International Women’s Day with rallies against domestic violence and sexual harassment and demands for equal rights.

In Iraq, several hundred women demonstrated in downtown Baghdad against the country’s new interim constitution, which they fear will restrict their rights by enshrining the role of Islam.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai noted that girls and women had begun returning to schools, colleges and the work force since the U.S.-led military campaign in late 2001 swept away the Taliban’s hardline Islamic regime.

In Bangladesh, women protested against the illegal but still widely observed custom of demanding a dowry as a condition of marriage.

“We live in a country where women are killed simply because their families can’t pay dowry money,” women’s rights advocate Ayesha Khanam told 2,000 demonstrators in the capital, Dhaka.

In Nepal, a general strike to protest abuse against women shut down schools, shops and businesses. The action was organized by the female wing of the country’s leftist rebel group.

Russian President Vladimir Putin invited successful women from various fields to his residence outside Moscow and awarded them with state medals for their achievements.

“In our country, women do not take second place to men,” he said.

While some former Soviet republics have dropped Women’s Day as a relic of the Communist era, it is still an official holiday in Russia, where men give flowers and gifts to female relatives, friends and colleagues.