SINGAPORE, March 8: Asia marked International Women's Day on Tuesday with rallies and protests against a wide range of gender inequalities and acts of violence, although there were some celebrations for hard-won victories.

In Bangladesh, where hundreds of women continue to be disfigured each year from acid attacks, victims converged on Dhaka to call for greater government efforts to stop the brutal practice.

Nearly 2,000 women in Bangladesh have had acid thrown on them since 1999, according to the Acid Survivors' Foundation, with their attackers most often men who have had their advances rejected.

"On Women's Day, our slogan is law, justice and good governance will help fight acid attacks," one of the rally's organizers, Rahman, said. The United Nations-mandated Women's Day was being marked in Pakistan by a similar battle to end "honour crimes".

In the Philippines, the decades-old campaign for justice by women who were forced into sexual slavery at the hands of Japanese World War II occupation forces, was again a rallying cry on Women's Day.

Twenty elderly women who say they were sex slaves staged a protest at the Japanese embassy because they were "still bereft of justice and recognition by the Japanese and Philippine governments," women's group Kaisa Ka said.

In China, women's rights were one of the "hot topics" among lawmakers gathered in Beijing for the annual meeting of the National People's Congress (NPC), according to the state-run China Daily newspaper.

The All-China Women's Federation is campaigning at the NPC for a law to protect women in the workplace, following a recent survey in Beijing that showed 86 per cent of women had been victims of sexual harassment.

At a forum in Bangkok to mark International Women's Day, the United Nations and rights groups warned last December's tsunami disaster had led to wide-ranging follow-up dangers for female survivors.

"The Indian Ocean tsunami... has produced some very gender-specific aftershocks, ranging from women giving birth in unsafe conditions to increased cases of rape and abuse," Cholpon Akmatova, from the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development, told the forum.

"Women, marginalised and dis-empowered under normal circumstances are more at risk because of their socio-economic status, barriers to choice and lack of access to resources." However it was not all bleak news for Asia's women on Tuesday. In South Korea, women's groups staged plays, dances and exhibitions to mark a victory for gender equality - the abolition of a century-old family registration. -AFP