Egyptian courts are handing down death sentences with "alarming frequency" as the state attempts to use capital punishment to stem rising crime rates. Over 269 death sentences were imposed in 2009, up from 86 the previous year. Rights groups say the courts appear to be acting under government pressure to send a strong message to the public.

Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans living in South Africa are still living in desperate squalor, in a country that offers them no official sanctuary. This is according to a new report released by the Solidarity Peace Trust, titled: “Desperate lives, twilight worlds - how a million Zimbabweans live without sanction or sanctuary in South Africa.” The report released on Wednesday details the dire reality facing Zimbabwean immigrants who fled their country seeking safety and work in South Africa, a trend that is still continuing.

There have been numerous reports from human rights organisations and from the MDC-T of an upsurge of violence in rural areas such as in Mutasa North, Mudzi, Bindura and Masvingo, by ZANU PF sponsored thugs. On Wednesday the pressure group Restoration of Human Rights (ROHR) reported that terror had broken out in Muzarabani, resulting in 16 families fleeing their homes.

At least 400 children, mostly pedestrians, die in road accidents in Uganda every year, the Minister of Works and Transport has announced. 46% of those injured road accidents are urban children and it is twice the percent of falls and burns added together, according to the Injury Control Centre of Uganda report.

The food insecure population in Southern Sudan has increased significantly since January, following escalated inter-tribal/clan and cattle–raiding conflicts during 2009, combined with poor rainfall that led to reduced crop and off-farm production. Areas affected by conflict include Jonglei, Warrap, Unity, and Lakes states, as well as Mvolo and Mundri East counties in Western Equatoria.

A majority of a pre-trial chamber of International Criminal Court (ICC) judges today approved the ICC prosecutor's request to open an investigation into Kenya's 2007 post-election violence, Human Rights Watch said. The Kenyan inquiry is the first investigation begun by the prosecutor acting on his own initiative.

The rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others, including at least 80 children, during a previously unreported four-day rampage in the Makombo area of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo in December 2009, Human Rights Watch said in a report.

Heavy rains hit Maniema province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), flooding the provincial capital Kindu and seven neighbouring villages, according to the local government. The port city of Kindu was submerged with at least 1,220 citizens displaced in the rains that pounded the area and lifted the water levels in the River Congo, the local environment department reported on Tuesday.

Large-scale leases of African farmland by foreign investors risk driving conflict and fueling corruption in the region, farm experts said Monday at a conference on agricultural research and development. But if regulations for responsible foreign land investment can be drafted and followed, such leases could provide a much-needed cash infusion for African agriculture which has struggled to find investment elsewhere, they said.

Royal Dutch Shell is holding back the tears no more. Shell apologises to all inhabitants of Nigeria’s Niger Delta for the many years of human rights violations, for which Shell takes full responsibility. Confronted with massive evidence of human rights violations that can only be attributed to its operations in the Niger Delta, Royal Dutch Shell is extremely proud to be the first international petrochemical company to publicly say: We are sorry.

Reflecting on the background to Ethiopia's 1984 famine and the global media's portrayal of an 'icon of misery', Vijay Prashad revisits the broader geopolitical context behind the country's repeated bouts of food insecurity during the period. If Haiti, as a contemporary equivalent, is to be able to offer prosperity to its people, then the current momentum behind raising aid needs to be harnessed to cancel the country's iniquitous debt, Prashad stresses, as part of a broader global transformation of economic relations envisaged under initiatives such as the 1973 United Nations new international economic order (NIEO).

One year after the criminal attacks on Egyptian Baha’is in the village of Shuraniya in Sohag, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) expressed its disappointment at the Public Prosecutor’s failure to bring the assailants and those who incited the attacks to justice. For one full year, state authorities have yet to bring justice to the victims of the attacks or enable Baha’is forcibly removed from their homes to return

Fahamu’s is pleased to introduce the Fahamu Refugee E-Newsletter, a monthly publication thataims to provide a forum for providers of refugee legal aid.

With a focus on the major geographical areas in the global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America, and non-EU Europe), it aims to serve the needs of legal aid providers as well as raise awareness of refugee concerns among the wider readership of Pambazuka News.

The E-Newsletter will follow recent developments in the interpretation of refugee law; case law precedents from other constituencies; reports and helpful resources for refugee legal aid NGOs; and stories of struggle and success in refugee legal aid work. It welcomes contributions from legal aid
providers, refugees, and others interested or involved in refugee legal aid.

* Please send comments to
[email protected] or comment online
at Pambazuka News.

Informal traders’ hopes of making huge profits during the upcoming World Cup tourist influx were shattered last week when they were ordered to vacate Park Station, a key transit hub in Johannesburg’s central business district. Ironically, the incident occurred during South Africa’s Human Rights Day celebrations; the day South Africa remembers 69 victims from Sharpeville who died during the protest of pass laws.

The soldiers who arrived in Makombo, a remote district in northern Congo on 14 December last year were practised at this sort of thing. Wearing Ugandan or Congolese army uniforms, they did everything at first to allay the suspicions of villagers, as they searched for areas where children would gather – markets, churches or water points. Once they had identified their prey, they tied them with rope or wire into human chains up to 15 people long, and forced them to carry off the goods they had looted.

MRS Fellowships are offered by the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS) at the American University in Cairo through generous contributions from the Ford Foundation and the International Organization of Migration (IOM). The fellowships are intended to enable qualified Egyptian Students to enroll in any of the graduates programs of the Center for Migration and Refugees Studies.

Register now for “African Refugee and Immigrants: Challenges, Changes, Champions” – From May 3-5, 2010 in Arlington, VA. Ethiopian Community Development Council is hosting a conference on African Refugees and Immigrants. Please join federal and local government officials, NGO and CBO representatives, refugees and immigrants, academics, and other experts engaged in refugee and immigrant issues.

To throw out bogus refugee claimants, Canada has introduced a new bill that will usher in a new system within a year. Though Canada accepts about 260,000 new immigrants each year legally, thousands of people entering this country on tourist visas or fake papers stay back to apply for refugee status on grounds of persecution in their home countries.

Thick dust clouds obscure the horizon as the convoy of UN military observers sets off to patrol the oil-rich, yet desperately underdeveloped Unity State in Southern Sudan. In these borderlands, monitoring a 2005 deal that halted decades of war between north and south is a major undertaking.

Western nations, employing the best equipped armies in the world, are increasingly dropping their support for UN peacekeeping missions in Africa, rather focusing their efforts on Afghanistan. Even the Darfur and Congo crises are neglected.