"Logic dictates that half of society should not be kept away from areas they should be a part of," Narmin Othman, the top higher education official in Iraqi Kurdistan, said in an opening address.

The conference, which called itself the "Voice of Iraqi Women" would "enhance awareness and promote the goal for women to play a proper role in society", Othman said.

Officials from the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) running Iraq said the session would break into workshops addressing human rights, judicial and legal issues, society, health, education, and the constitution.

Senior US and British officials were on hand to lend their government's support for the effort in the new Iraq, which remains a part of the Arab world where women have traditionally played a low-key role in public life.

Britain's secretary of state for trade and industry, Patricia Hewitt, and US undersecretary of state for global affairs, Paula Dobriansky, both addressed the session bearing messages from their respective leaders, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W Bush.

"We honour and support the efforts of Iraqi women who are determined to have a strong voice in the future of their country," Hewitt paraphrased Blair as saying.

Dobriansky, according to a conference organiser, spoke at a closed-door lunch for the group, and CPA officials were not available to provide details on her remarks or schedule while in Iraq.

Pascale Isho, head of the Assyrian Women's Organisation, hailed the session as "the first step for women to regain their basic and fundamental rights, primarily concerning decision-making in Iraq".

Women's rights "were choked during the Baathist suppressive regime", she said.

Other delegates said Iraqi women were ready to right the wrongs of previous governments.

"We were ignored in the past," Ala Talabani, a women's union leader in northern Iraq who heads the constitutional workshop, said. "Now we want the voice of Iraqi women to be heard at all levels."

Talabani, a niece of top Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, aimed criticism at the US-led civilian administration here for not including more women in the upcoming "transitory governing council" which US overseer Paul Bremer said he will unveil in the next two weeks.

"They will be very, very few," she said.

An expert close to the appointment process said that the 25-member council will include just four women.

Some women held key posts in government offices or ministries during Saddam's 24-year rule, and women's education levels were among the highest in the Arab world.

But only one woman, Baath Party command member Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, brushed the top echelons of power.