A hundred years after their ancestors went to war with Germany to resist colonial rule, Tanzanians are now contemplating seeking war reparations for the atrocities committed by the Germans during the Maji Maji war. The two-year war, which was fought between 1905 and 1907, started at Nandete in Kilwa district, Lindi region but soon spread to other southern areas of the country such as Songea in Ruvuma region. A total of 249,530 people died during the war, which affected the Ngoni, Matumbi, Waluguru, Makua, Yao and Makonde people.

The Attorney-General's office will reintroduce the extraction of confessions by police through the amended Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2005. An official from the National Counter Terrorism Centre, said this would be reintroduced albeit with regulatory mechanisms to bar its abuse. The centre falls under the A-G's office. He said it was difficult to get a conviction against suspects accused of engaging in acts of terror if the law stops the police from extracting confessions. Kenya has ratified international human rights treaties and is due to give its initial report on torture to the UN committee.

Some 73,000 South Sudanese refugees currently in Ethiopia can start going home thanks to an agreement signed by the United Nations refugee agency and the Governments of Ethiopia and Sudan. The tripartite agreement, which was signed in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa on Monday, sets out the legal framework for the repatriation as well as the roles and obligations of all three parties, according to an official with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who said it includes crucial provisions on the voluntary nature of the returns.

The five key players in Cote d’Ivoire’s conflict have renewed their commitment to peace efforts after holding their first face-to-face talks at home since war broke out more than three years ago. While there were few concrete agreements, Tuesday’s four-hour meeting behind closed doors broke new ground and brought fresh hopes of a breakthrough in stumbling efforts to reunify the West African nation, divided between a rebel-held north and government south since 2002.

The Eritrean government has rejected a proposal by the United Nations Security Council to hold talks with an independent commission to resolve its ongoing border dispute with Ethiopia. "The final and binding decision of the Boundary Commission marks the legal conclusion of the Eritrea-Ethiopia issue once and for all," said a statement issued by the Eritrean foreign ministry on Monday. Eritrea was referring to the original ruling of the commission, which was handed down in April 2002, according to Alertnet.

Warning that there is "a huge risk for conflict to rise again" in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC), the top United Nations refugee official has called on the international community to provide greater support for the vast country's transition to full democracy for the first time in 45 years. "The scale of the problem, the complexity of the problem, and the nature of the problem are such that all our resources combined together won't easily solve it," UN High Commissioner for Refugees AntÃ'nio Guterres told ambassadors from donor countries in Kinshasa, capital of a nation that is moving towards national elections in June after the most lethal fighting in the world since World War II.

Liberian children are being sold for adoption in dubious circumstances and others are living in sub-standard orphanages, according to rights groups in the West African nation. Some institutions, while purporting to help orphans, are charging huge sums of money for adoptions, the National Child Rights Observation Group (NACROG), said in a report this week. NACROG, comprising representatives of local and international NGOs, civil society, and several ministries, is asking the government to investigate three orphanages and calling for a halt to all adoptions from Liberia.

As international concerns regarding the human rights situation in Ethiopia escalate, Amnesty International has called for the immediate and unconditional release of opposition leaders, human rights defenders and journalists who will face trial on charges that include treason, violent conspiracy and "genocide". "These people are prisoners of conscience, imprisoned solely on account of their non-violent opinions and activities," said Kolawole Olaniyan, Director of Amnesty International's Africa Programme. "It is unacceptable that they are now facing serious criminal charges that could lead to death sentences and possible execution."

Forced by war or humanitarian disasters to flee their homes but keeping within the borders of their own countries, 12 million so-called "internally displaced persons" face a legal and human tragedy in Africa. Calling it "one of the biggest under-addressed challenges facing Africa", Dennis McNamara, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator and director of the Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division, says urgent attention must be paid to the uprooted civilian population in countries like Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Burundi.

In this interview, Ambassador Boniface Chidyausiku of Zimbabwe discusses the progress that a new Human Rights Council would bring and points out the "sticking points" in the debate. Chidyausiku has concerns that the Council will contain double standards, where countries like the US are not called upon for activities in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, yet developing states are punished for "unsubstantiated and politicized issues." Chidyausiku believes Washington has been unable to control the Human Rights Commission, and hence seeks to change the body.

This Partnership Africa Canada report shows how illicit diamond trafficking remains the biggest obstacle on the bumpy road to peace and stability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Armed militias smuggled an estimated $200-300 million worth of diamonds out of the country in 2005. Given the importance of the diamond industry in the DRC - it sustains 800,000 people and their families - the Kinshasa government and the UN peacekeeping mission must take action to ensure that benefits reach those who live and work in diamond mining areas.

At least 123 people have been killed in four days of sectarian violence across Nigeria, after protests over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad fuelled underlying religious and ethnic tensions. Two-thirds of the deaths in the past six days have occurred in the mainly Christian southeast city of Onitsha, where groups of armed youths took to the streets to seek revenge against Muslims in reprisal for deadly attacks on Christians last weekend in the predominantly Muslim north.

Namibia’s National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) is deeply alarmed by credible allegations of systematic arbitrary deprivation of liberty taking place in the mountain Kingdom of Lesotho. According to the Lesotho Council of NGOs (Lecongo) the situation directly results both from unlawful actions by law enforcement officials and systematic interference in the affairs of the judiciary.

The situation in Shearia worsened in November 2005 as a result of the town becoming the new front for confrontations between government forces and the rebel opposition in Darfur despite the Ceasefire Agreement and ongoing negotiations in Abuja to secure peace for the region. The government strategy of shifting the war to the town began in early September following an SLA attack in Shearia town during which the rebel forces looted approximately 1,000 camels and reportedly killed 18 civilians.

Environmental advocacy group, Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), has said last week's bombing of Ijaw communities in Delta State was a crude manifestation of the country's military penchant for excessive use of force as response to agitations in the Niger Delta. The group in an online statement accused the Federal Government of using its military might to suppress certain Niger Delta communities it perceived as being in the vanguard of the campaign for environmental justice.

Tens of thousands of people die every month in war torn northern Uganda as a result of disease, poor living conditions and war, according to a new report by NGOs working in the region. The report released by Civil Society Organisations for Peace in Northern Uganda (CSOPNU), said at least 131 people mostly children die everyday as a result of the violence and poor conditions in hundreds of IDP camps. "There are 918 excess deaths each week. Each month, almost 25,000 people in Uganda die from easily preventable diseases," CSOPNU said. This would translate into 47, 736 deaths in a year. CSOPNU is a coalition of about 40 member organisations advocating lasting peace in the region.

Millions are victims of the latest drought to hit Africa, reports Reuters Alertnet. As in Niger and southern Africa in 2005, the United Nations is pleading for hundreds of millions of dollars to fight the threat of a major humanitarian catastrophe in eastern Africa. But while some believe higher powers are behind the deadly droughts, agricultural experts and environmentalists say man himself is largely to blame because of years of neglect and mismanagement of land and other resources.

Floods that uprooted 50,000 refugees are a reminder that the world urgently needs to solve Africa's longest-running territorial dispute, the leader of the Western Sahara independence movement has said. Heavy rains over the past few days washed away the homes of about 50,000 of the 158,000 refugees who have lived in desert camps near the Algerian town of Tindouf for 30 years since fleeing the disputed Western Sahara territory.

The crisis in Darfur, Sudan, which has been trickling into Chad for the better part of three years, is now bleeding freely across the border, says a report from Human Rights Watch. A counterinsurgency carried out by the Sudanese government and its militias against rebel groups in Darfur, characterized by war crimes and “ethnic cleansing,” has forcibly displaced almost two million civilians in Darfur and another 220,000 people who have fled across the border into Chad. The same ethnic “Janjaweed” militias that have committed systematic abuses in Darfur have staged cross-border raids into Chad, attacking Darfurian refugees and Chadian villagers alike, seizing their livestock and killing those who resist.

Forced by war or humanitarian disasters to flee their homes but keeping within the borders of their own countries, 12 million so-called "internally displaced persons" (IDPs) face a legal and human tragedy in Africa. Calling it "one of the biggest under-addressed challenges facing Africa", Dennis McNamara, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator and director of the Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division, says urgent attention must be paid to the uprooted civilian population in countries like Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Burundi.