The July edition of the Art for Humanity newsletter is available. The edition includes news on 'Dialogue Among Civilizations', 'Artwork by Amodou Kane-Sy and Poem by Marouba Fall', 'Youth Day 2012' and 'Art and Social Justice Workshops'. Click .

The independent trade unions that have sprung up across Egypt over the last 17 months face an uncertain future, caught between Islamists and the military and operating under labour laws that have not changed since Hosni Mubarak was in power. 'The government and business owners don’t want to respond to workers’ demands or give them rights, so they are opposed to seeing workers establish independent syndicates,' says Kamal Abu Eita, a leader of the independent union movement.

A prominent Ethiopian journalist and blogger has been sentenced to 18 years in jail for violating the country's anti-terrorism legislation. Eskinder Nega and 23 others were found guilty last month. They were accused of links with US-based opposition group Ginbot Seven, which Ethiopia considers a terrorist organisation. Opposition activist Andualem Arage was given a life sentence by the court in the capital, Addis Ababa.

Armed, masked assailants abducted and beat a veteran journalist in Mali on Thursday, leaving him with a broken hand and other injuries, according to news reports and local journalists. Eight gunmen stormed the offices of L'Indépendant newspaper in the capital, Bamako, at about 9pm, firing in the air to disperse staff and bystanders, and then seizing publisher Saouti Labass Haïdara and taking him away in a 4-by-4 vehicle, news reports said. Haïdara, dumped by a roadside four hours later, was treated at a hospital in Bamako, local journalists said.

Darfuri refugees in Chad continue to depend almost entirely on humanitarian assistance for their basic needs, notes a June 2011 report by the US Cultural Orientation Centre. Access to arable land remains generally non-existent for these refugees, says ACT Alliance, an alliance of 125 churches and related organizations that work together in humanitarian assistance, advocacy and development.

A Ghanaian NGO called Abantu for Development has teamed up with the country’s Department of Women to draft a political affirmative action law to open the doors for women. 'If we do not put in place special temporary measures, women will never make it into public office,' said Hilary Gbedemah, a lawyer and the rector of the Law Institute in Accra who has worked on the draft legislation.

Copyright, and patents, were once about balance – balancing the public interest of encouraging creativity with the public interest of access to creative works and intellectual endeavours, states this article on copyright in the digital age. 'Copyright is not encouraging creativity or intellectual endeavour. By creating private property on goods that were paid for publicly (through paying the academics for their time), all copyright is doing here is creating artificial property rights, artificial restrictions on information.'

When Abdo Giro*, a 55-year-old evangelist minister and political dissident from southern Ethiopia, paid smugglers 55,000 birr (US$3,095) to take him from the Kenyan border town of Moyale to Johannesburg in South Africa, he was completely unprepared for the ordeal that lay ahead. Instead of the promised 'nice car', he was lucky to end up in a packed mini-bus for the first leg of the journey through Kenya and Tanzania. Smugglers are capitalizing on the demand for their services and the relative impunity with which they operate by making increasing financial demands on desperate migrants while showing little regard for their safety.

In 2010, Google announced the availability of driving directions on Google Maps in many African countries. The internet giant has now launched walking directions for 44 African countries.

Crucial hearings will begin on Monday 16 July 2012 in the High Court on time limitation periods applicable in the landmark case brought by Kenyan victims of alleged torture during the Kenya Emergency in the 1950s and 1960s. The British Government is arguing that the claims are time-barred and should be struck out, but the victims contend that this is a case in which the Judge should exercise his discretion and allow the claims to proceed. REDRESS, a London-based human rights organisation that helps torture survivors obtain justice and reparation, has made submissions in support of the victims’ claims.

Brief nine of the National Reconciliation and Transitional Justice Audit reveals perspectives on issues of conflict, peace and justice by the community in Nakapiripirit in Karamoja, in the north-east of Uganda. The major concern of the participants in Nakapiripirit was the strained relationship between themselves as citizens in Karamoja and the state ruling them from central level. They said that in their local language, 'state' is 'arirang', which can be translated as 'enemy' or 'violent institution'. According to them, the relationship has been characterized by mutual distrust right from colonial times up to now, coupled with deliberate marginalization and an attempt to take away the Karimojong's way of life. They lamented that the rest of Uganda looks at Karamoja as a region apart and says that 'we shall not wait for Karamoja to develop'. In their view, conflicts in Uganda are a reflection of bad governance practices, such as corruption, unfree and unfair elections, lack of term limits, and an absence of border security. This inspires anger towards the Government and provokes rebellion. Impacts of conflicts include more strained relationships between citizens and the state, and delayed development. In that sense, causes and impacts of conflict constitute a vicious cycle.

In the eastern Congo, a onetime rebel leader charged with a range of war crimes lived in high style for three years, in full view of a large United Nations peacekeeping force. How did the UN find itself in the middle of one of the world's bloodiest and most unmanageable conflicts? And why are its troops picking sides? These are the questions this Wall Street Journal article investigates.

Protesters against government interference in religious affairs staged the latest of a series of mosque sit-ins in the Ethiopian capital on Sunday, saying police had arrested dozens in the run up to this weekend's African Union summit. Two activists told Reuters the sit-in - in protest at the government's promotion of the moderate Al Ahbash branch of Islam over other doctrines - had already been surrounded by police although there had been no clashes as yet on Sunday. Online activists, who have been using social media to call for demonstrations, have reported several deaths during previous clashes, and published several pictures of injuries they claim are those of victims.

This discussion paper from the Transnational Institute's Agrarian Justice Programme argues that there is a need to come to grips with land issues in a changing global context and to rethink what may be needed to mobilise effectively in such a setting. 'The main frameworks of advocacy that have been employed by some academics, radical researchers and social movement activists have some particular limitations in the context of global land grabbing. Neither land reform nor land tenure security alone are well-equipped to be frameworks for analysis or action in the current conjuncture. Land reform remains important, but its limitations as a call to action are being exposed by the current cycle of land grabbing. Likewise, land tenure security is important, but alone is not enough, since adverse incorporation of the rural working poor classes into the corporate-controlled global food-feed-fuel regime does not necessarily require moving them off the land.'

About 120,000 people in the coastal, mid- and far western regions of the self-declared republic of Somaliland require emergency food assistance after four years of failed rains, says Mohamed Mousa Awale, chairman of Somaliland's environment research and disaster preparedness agency. The most affected areas include the Salel Region localities of Asha-Ado, Lughaya, Garba-Dadar, Gargaara and Waraqa-dhigta where some 450 tons of food aid from Djibouti was distributed on 6 July.

The so-called Arab Spring continues to reverberate locally, regionally and geopolitically. The 20 articles in this issue of Forced Migration Review reflect on some of the experiences, challenges and lessons of the Arab Spring in North Africa, the implications of which resonate far wider than the region itself.

Somalis living in the world’s largest refugee camp risk being recruited by armed groups and bandits as children grow up without education in increasingly desperate conditions, eight aid agencies said. Kenya’s overcrowded Dadaab camp, whose population swelled to 465,000 as a result of last year’s famine in war-torn Somalia, has been hit by a wave of bomb blasts and grenade attacks. 'You have lots of youth in Dadaab who can’t work - they don’t have an education, they’ve got limited ways of feeding their families,' Alun McDonald, Oxfam’s East Africa spokesman, told AlertNet.

The world’s 105 biggest companies are worth more than US$11 trillion. They touch the lives of people across the globe. But just how much do we know about their impact on daily lives? Too often, citizens experience little benefit from global economic activity while suffering the consequences of unethical corporate activity. Transparency in Corporate Reporting assesses the disclosure of steps these companies have in place to fight corruption. It also looks at companies’ transparency footprint across 177 countries: to what extent are earnings and taxes in specific countries made public.

The Sudanese authorities should immediately stop the torture and ill-treatment of those detained following demonstrations since mid-June 2012, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said. 'Torture and other ill-treatment are absolutely prohibited under international law,' said Aster van Kregten, Amnesty International's deputy director for Africa. 'We call on the Sudanese authorities to ensure that every credible allegation of such abuse is subject to prompt and impartial investigations, and to ensure that the victims receive reparations.'

The South Sudanese government must take immediate action to identify and prosecute those responsible for the recent attack on anti-corruption activist, Deng Athuai, said Global Witness. On 4 July, the Chairperson of the South Sudan Civil Society Alliance, Mr. Deng Athuai Mawiir, was kidnapped in front of his hotel in the South Sudanese capital, Juba. He was reportedly held and beaten for three days by unknown assailants and interrogated about his work on corruption issues in the country. 'When civil society’s freedom to operate is threatened, all efforts to fight corruption and impunity are threatened,' said Global Witness campaigner Dana Wilkins. 'The South Sudanese government has promised its citizens an open and democratic society. It must now make good on that promise by bringing Deng Athuai’s attackers to justice.'