Civil society has criticised the proposed National Intelligence Service Bill which allow security agents to tap telephone conversations. Kenya National Commission for Human Rights (KNCHR) commissioner Omar Hassan and human rights activist Al Amin Kimathi vowed to lobby different organisations and the government to amend the Act before it is tabled in Parliament. The activists said the Bill will infringe on people’s privacy as it not only allows government agencies to record one’s conversation, but it also empowers police to invade a private house in search of information.

At least 300,000 Congolese civilians have weapons in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a report released by a research group in Brussels said on Monday. According to the report by the Group of Information and Research on Peace (GRIP), at least 80 per cent of men have weapons in the province of Kivu and Katanga. The investigators of GRIP questioned some 10,000 heads of families in these regions that are, or have been, the theatre of clashes between armed groups and the Congolese government forces.

This issue includes the following articles:

- Introductory essay, by Nancy Peluso and Christian Lund.
- Alice Kelley, UC Berkeley, Conservation Practice as Primitive Accumulation.
- Catherine Corson, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, USA, Territorialization, Enclosure and Neoliberalism: Non-State Influence
in Struggles over Madagascar’s Forests.
- Nancy Peluso, UC Berkeley, Emergent Forest and Private Land Regimes in Java.

Over six million Moroccan children set off to schools a few days ago. This year, the beginning of the school term was accompanied with lively debates over the future of the kingdom's state education system. Moroccans have voiced little confidence in state education and are critical of both teachers and the government's strategy in this sector.

International justice advocates are worried that donors will deprive the International Criminal Court (ICC) of sufficient funding next year, hindering the court’s ability to fulfil an expanding mandate that will stretch from Kenya to Libya and potentially Ivory Coast. In late July, the court proposed a 2012 budget of 159.45 million dollars, an increase of 13.6 percent over 2011. Even before the proposal was submitted, however, key donors were issuing calls for zero growth in the court’s budget.

Four years after the Great Recession, a catastrophe has been avoided, but few real lessons have been drawn and nothing has been fixed, says this report from the International Labour Organisation. 'Indeed, in many cases the crisis is being used as another opportunity to subordinate individual workers, governments and entire societies to the sway of unaccountable global capital markets. After a short revival of corporatist social dialogue in some countries, more workers are being pushed into precarious employment, and austerity packages are making working people, their families and pensioners pay for the crisis.'

A French appeals court has ruled against extraditing the wife of Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda's former president, home to stand trial in connection with the African nation's 1994 genocide. Agathe Habyarimana has been wanted in Kigali by the Rwandan state prosecutor since 2009 on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for her alleged role in the Rwandan genocide. The massacre was sparked by the death of her husband, whose plane was shot down in the same year.

A purported spokesman for a Nigerian Islamist sect blamed for scores of attacks, including last month's bombing of UN headquarters, has rejected a proposal to negotiate with the government. A spokesman for Boko Haram told journalists in a conference call in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, where the sect has carried out most of its attacks, that the group would push ahead with its violent campaign.

Tanzania has said should the world experience a second economic downturn, the impact on East African Community (EAC) countries would be more telling as the economies of the five partner states were more interconnected than never before. The Minister for Finance, Mr Mustafa Mkulo told a sideline session of the 2011 IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Washington DC that shocks for Africa, especially the EAC members from a new economic downturn would be worse than in last crisis. He recalled that three years ago Africa was hit hard by the global economic crisis as exports dropped and financial flows declined.

Even before the Arab Spring had shown the power of the internet to accelerate the free flow of news and views and to bring like-minded citizens together to mobilize for change, authoritarian regimes had introduced extensive controls over digital media. Authoritarian regimes had built pervasive, multilayered systems for online censorship and surveillance. These systems have grown more diverse and sophisticated in the past two years, as documented in Freedom House's 2011 'Freedom on the Net' report and elsewhere.

This statement dates from 1961, but 50 years later it is being reposted here for its historical and contemporary relevance. The statement notes that, 'neo-Colonialism manifests itself through economic and political intervention, intimidation and blackmail in order to prevent African states from directing their political, social and economic programmes towards the exploitation of their natural wealth for the benefit of their peoples.'

Botswana labour unions have asked a court to force the government to reinstate about 2 600 public service workers fired during the country's first national strike in April. 'Our comrades were participating in a legal strike and the government has no right to dismiss them, hence the decision to seek court's intervention,' said Andrew Motsamai, president of Botswana Public Employees Union. The workers, including doctors and nurses, were fired after the state won a court order forcing them to return to work, after they embarked on the nationwide mass action over wages.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information has strongly condemned the ongoing deterioration of freedom of opinion and expression in Egypt. This follows news that Dr.Tarek Zidan, head of the 'Egypt Revolution Party' has proceeded with a criminal lawsuit no. 13846 for the year 2011 against Asmaa Mahfouz, accusing her of insulting and defaming him via her twitter account by posting false news about him.

A surge in new leprosy cases in a remote region of Madagascar could not have come at a worse time. Once a prosperous vanilla-exporting town, Antalaha has suffered the economic consequences of two years of political instability that began with the March 2009 coup in which Andry Rajoelina, with the support of the military, deposed President Marc Ravalomanana. Numerous foreign aid and trade benefits on which the country was heavily reliant, particularly for the funding of social sectors, have since been suspended.

African economies face considerable risks from a renewed global economic downturn, African finance ministers told a Washington news briefing. They added that the continent’s economies are still on the recovery path from the previous global crisis and are in the process of restoring critical economic buffers. The ministers also stressed that Africa was bracing for adverse effects from the economic problems in the euro zone, with export receipts and remittances particularly vulnerable. They noted that, as a new global downturn threatened, African countries were more interconnected than ever before with their neighbors and with their principal markets.

A Sweden-based journalist was publicly threatened in connection with her reporting on the case of Dawit Isaac, a Swedish-Eritrean journalist who has been imprisoned in Eritrea for a decade without charge, according to news reports and CPJ interviews. A day earlier in New York, bodyguards for the Eritrean leader Isaias Afewerki pushed and threatened two Swedish journalists seeking to speak to the president about the Isaac case, the journalists said.

The Justice and Reconciliation in Africa programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation has recently released four new policy briefs, together with the Justice and Reconciliation Project. The briefs focus on Northern Uganda, as the region tries to recover after more than two decades of war.

In the run-up to parliamentary elections, due to be held in December, at least three protesters were killed in the Guinean capital, Conakry, when security forces broke up an opposition demonstration. Police used tear gas and batons against the stone-throwing protesters. Dozens of police vehicles and paramilitary forces prevented opposition activists from reaching a stadium.

In September 2001, President Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea ordered the detention of 21 senior government members and journalists who criticised him and his government. Since then, he has closed all independent media outlets and turned Eritrea into a country where arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearance, and death are rife and where it is almost impossible to leave. This Human Rights Watch paper, 'Eritrea: 10 Long Years, A Briefing on Eritrea’s Missing Political Prisoners', outlines what is known about the political prisoners, none of whom has been seen by outsiders since being detained.

Health minister Aaron Motsoaledi is set to meet justice ministry officials to rectify what his office terms 'contradictions' in the Sexual Offences Act of 2007 and the Children's Act of 2005. One law makes it legal for children of 12 and older to access contraceptives, and the other criminalises sex for youngsters of that age. Recently, children's rights activists were outraged when it emerged that National Prosecution Authority head Menzi Simelane had used the Act to authorise the prosecution of at least two groups of children between the ages of 12 and 16 for having consensual sex.