On 6 June 2010, Khaled Said, 28, was beaten by two plain-clothes police officers in an internet café in Egypt’s second city, Alexandria. He was then dragged out into the street where, eyewitnesses say, the beating continued until he died. Khaled Said quickly became a symbol for every victim of the security forces’ brutality. The first seeds of what would become the ‘25 January Revolution’ were sown in Alexandria on 6 June 2010. Despite the uprising, however, the trial for those accused of killing Khaled Said is still ongoing.

The majority of Tunisia's political parties have approved the postponement of the election date for the country's Constituent Assembly to 23 October, the official TAP press agency has reported. The new date was announced by Tunisian caretaker Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi, after the head of the independent election committee had suggested 16 October, ruling out the initial date of 24 July for logistic reasons.

On Wednesday, 30 March 2011, the Refugee Space Project reports that Mr Swedi Fataki Mutambala was arrested in Gasorwe Refugee Camp, Muyinga Province. According to refugees talked to over the phone, Swedi - leader of the Association for the Defense of Refugees (ADR) in Burundi - had been sick and gone to the camp administrator so that he could go to Bujumbura hospital for a medical check-up. The police had arrived and Swedi had been arrested. Refugees said they did not know the reason for the arrest, but a few months ago refugees had been complaining about the violation of their rights.

Egypt and Kingdom Holding Co., the company controlled by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, have signed an agreement in Cairo over contested land in Toshka in southern Egypt. The signing ends a dispute over a 100,000-feddan (104,000- acre) piece of land that is part of the Toshka agricultural development project, which is intended to use water diverted from the Aswan High Dam reservoir to irrigate land in Egypt’s western desert. Kingdom’s original acquisition came under criticism after a revolution in Egypt that ended the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

This Human Rights Watch report documents the intensification of the eight-year conflict over the past six months. Since December 2010, a surge in government-led attacks on populated areas and a campaign of aerial bombing have killed and injured scores of civilians, destroyed property, and displaced more than 70,000 people, largely from ethnic Zaghawa and Fur communities linked to rebel groups.

Five years after the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) revised its laws against sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), these crimes continue to go unpunished because of judicial inaction and a legal culture at odds with the changes. The laws, ignored and misinterpreted, have left escalating numbers of sexual violence survivors unprotected, and perpetrators free to violate again. When the penal code was amended in 2006, it was intended to 'prevent and severely reprimand infractions relating to sexual violence and to ensure systematic support for the victims of these crimes,' according to the text. To this end, it included previously ignored sexual violations addressed in international humanitarian law, and toughened up sentencing for those who violated the vulnerable, including children, the disabled and subordinates.

A human rights campaigner from Madagascar was in the UK recently to demand that the Royal Bank of Scotland withdraw its financing of companies mining tar sands in her country. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has a long track record of financing companies operating in the Canadian tar sands, which are devastating the land and lives of First Nations people in Alberta. The bank has also financed French oil giant Total’s test mining of tar sands in Madagascar over the last three years. Total is expected to decide next month whether to go ahead with larger scale exploitation of tar sands in the country. If it does, the water supply of more than 120,000 people in one of Madagascar’s poorest areas could be disrupted and poisoned and its unique biodiversity severely threatened.

While this toolkit has been designed primarily for the local partners and activists of the VNC campaign, this can be a resource, too, for human rights activists who are keen to develop their
online activism and want to know where and how to start. The toolkit aims to impart the following skills:
- An understanding of why and how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can
be appropriated by women's rights and human rights groups in their advocacy skills
through their use of online tools, including networking and mobile tools for advocacy and
campaigning.
- The ability to develop an advocacy/communication strategy.
- Knowing what social neworking is and the various spaces and tools they could use in their
online activism.
- An understanding of online privacy and security issues relevant to building their online
activism.

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir continues to commit crimes against humanity and carry out genocide against the residents of Darfur in defiance of the United Nations, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the Security Council. In 2005 the Council referred the situation in Darfur to the ICC after a UN inquiry found serious violations of international human rights law. The ICC has since issued arrest warrants against Mr. Bashir on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, making him the first sitting head of State to be indicted by the court.

'When I was pregnant with my son I drank a lot – mostly on weekends,' says Marion Williams, a 45-year-old mother who lost two of her five children in childbirth. Williams lives in one of South Africa’s famous wine-growing areas in the Western Cape. She started drinking as a teenager and was taken out of school, she suspects, to work to buy wine for her parents. 'It is estimated that at least one million people in this country have fetal alcohol syndrome and approximately five million have partial fetal alcohol syndrome and [other] fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. It’s tragic because it’s completely preventable,' says researcher and human geneticist Denis Viljoen in Cape Town, the provincial capital of South Africa’s Western Cape.

A senior Egyptian general admits that 'virginity checks' were performed on women arrested at a demonstration this spring, the first such admission after previous denials by military authorities. The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report, published weeks after the 9 March protest. It claimed female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks. The general said the virginity checks were done so that the women wouldn't later claim they had been raped by Egyptian authorities.

Six powerful explosions have been heard in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, as warplanes flew over the city. A powerful but distant blast was felt in the centre of the city at around 1900 GMT on Sunday 5 June, followed by stronger explosions a few minutes later, an AFP correspondent said, unable to immediately determine the targets. NATO fighter jets earlier launched intensive air raids on the capital and its eastern suburbs.

'Transparent governance, free expression and a free press are essential components of democracy. They are the means by which all people in South Africa, especially the vulnerable and poor, can hold our government to account. Our effectiveness at getting the state to implement HIV treatment and prevention programmes has been dependent on the Constitution being upheld, especially the Bill of Rights. We are therefore deeply concerned by reports that the ANC Parliamentary Caucus is backtracking even on its recent, inadequate concessions in relation to the Protection of Information Bill. As it stands, this bill will restrict media freedom. It will also severely limit the ability of organisations like ours to hold government accountable or to support government in working for a better life for all. The bill will drive a wedge between the state and the people it is supposed to serve.'

Top lawyers in the Southern African region have told SW Radio Africa that leaders in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) are turning their back on human rights, by dissolving the region’s human rights Tribunal. Concern is still high after the shock decision by SADC leaders to close the court, with growing warnings about what this will mean for the rule of law across Southern Africa. The move has been described as regressive and a serious threat to human rights, the rule of law, and the regional bloc’s credibility, because it means there is now no independent court in the region to protect citizens’ rights.

Over the course of 15 years (1994-2009), Elke Zuern has interviewed civic and social movement leaders, local government leaders, members of NGOs and other community organizations in South Africa. In her new book, The Politics of Necessity, she compares these movements in South Africa to those elsewhere on the continent (Benin, Botswana, Nigeria), and beyond (Argentina, Chile, Mexico). Read an excerpt from the introduction to the book on the blog Another Country.

The bodies of 150 African refugees fleeing turmoil in Libya have been recovered off the Tunisian coast after vessels carrying them to Europe got into difficulty. The boats ran into problems about 12 miles off the Tunisian island of Kerkennah, en route to Italy. Tunisian coastguard vessels aided by the military rescued 570 people, but many others went into the water when a stampede to get off the small fishing boats caused some of the vessels to capsize.

The UN Security Council has called on the Khartoum government to withdraw its forces immediately from the Abyei region, a key area of dispute in the north-south division of Sudan next month. There has been no agreement on which country the oil-producing region should belong to when south Sudan becomes independent on July 9, but the northern military seized it on 21 May 21, sparking fears of a renewed civil war. 'The council demands that the government of Sudan withdraw immediately from the Abyei area,' said a unanimous formal council statement.

'The Congress of South African Trade Unions welcomes the decision by ANC MPs to extend the 24 June deadline to complete drafting the Protection of Information Bill. COSATU hopes that the extra time will be used to re-examine the problematic clauses of the Bill which could conflict with Clause 16 of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. In particular the parliamentary ad-hoc committee needs to examine the genuine concerns from civil society that the provisions of the bill could be abused to cover up crime, corruption and misuse of funds by allowing officials to classify the evidence of this as secret.'

Between 20 September and 31 December 2010, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) carried out the Zimbabwe Documentation Process (ZDP). Intended as a model for similar documentation projects that the DHA plans to extend to other categories of Southern Africans, the process provided a path for regularising the status of undocumented migrants. It also provided an alternative to the asylum system, which Zimbabweans have turned to in large numbers. The African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) - formerly the Forced Migration Studies Programme - began sending researchers to observe the situation at several DHA offices. The findings from this monitoring provide a picture of how the process worked and highlight important problem areas.

Producing electricity from the local waterfall was once just a dream for two farming communities on the fertile lower slopes of Mount Kenya. But thanks to a local initiative backed by UN cash and know-how, it is now a reality. Eager to harness power from the waterfall, villagers started the project by building a weir and powerhouse. But without a turbine, the work was in vain. But then the UN Industrial Development Organisation, or UNIDO, stepped in to provide the turbines.