The Egyptian government has detained hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members solely for exercising their rights to freedom of speech, association and assembly, Human Rights Watch said. The Muslim Brotherhood, a banned but tolerated group, staged large demonstrations in Egyptian cities in early May calling for political reform. At least 800 members were arrested, and more than 300 are still in custody, most without charge. In a letter sent to President Husni Mubarak, Human Rights Watch called on the government to release the detainees without delay.  

This report summarises global levels and trends in the population of conern to the UNHCR: refugees, asylum-seekers, stateless, and others of conern.

With the peace process in Cote d'Ivoire running into fresh difficulties and the rebels once more resisting pressure to disarm, international mediator and South African president Thabo Mbeki has called the warring factions to a new summit. "The president proposed the 25th and 26th (of June) as the dates but all the parties can't make it. Therefore arrangements are being made to find another suitable date," Mbeki's spokesman Bheki Khumalo was quoted as saying by Agence France Presse.

As part of activities to mark the World Refugee Day, the government of Tanzania granted citizenship on Monday to the first 182 of 1,320 Somali refugees, a UN official said. A naturalisation ceremony was held at a refugee camp in Chogo village, in the northeastern Tanga region, which is home to 472 Somali refugee families.

The Liberia Repatriation, Resettlement and Reintegration Commission (LRRRC), the national agency that is responsible for internally displaced persons and Liberian refugees returning home, has announced the closure of four camps that have been hosting some 38,951 internally displaced people, a decision taken in consultation and collaboration with its implementing partners, the UNHCR, WFP and other humanitarian aid agencies. According to Mr. Dwuye, the camps were declared closed after most of the displaced people in the four camps received their resettlement and reintegration benefits.

Today, women and children remain the main casualties of war and civil strife, accounting for about 3/4 of the world refugee population. Boys as young as eight years are often abducted and forced to become child soldiers. Although the current Kenyan policy regarding the protection of refugees is encampment, there are urban refugees who are recognised and mandated by UNHCR to reside in urban centres.

Nations like Uganda that host hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighbouring African conflicts should serve as a lesson to the West, where asylum has become confused with terrorism and crime, the new head of the U.N.'s refugee agency said. Marking World Refugee Day with his first overseas trip in the role, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres was visiting camps in one of the most remote corners of the world -- northwest Uganda near the borders with Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Soon after independence many African countries took in large numbers of refugees, provided them with land, helped them to become self-reliant and, in some cases, to attain a high degree of economic, social and political integration. Today, however, there are fewer opportunities for that approach. Africa’s refugees generally find themselves confined to camps or designated zones where they are discouraged from becoming self-reliant. Often they are put under pressure to go back to their own country, regardless of whether or not conditions in their country of origin are unsafe or unstable.

More than 8,000 people have fled from the Central African Republic (CAR) into southern Chad over the past fortnight to escape a new outbreak of fighting in the northwest of the country, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Wednesday. The new arrivals joined 30,000 other CAR refugees who have been living in exile in southern Chad for almost three years, UNHCR official Bernard Ntwari told IRIN by telephone from N'Djamena. He said the latest exodus began following clashes between government troops and a rebel group that began on 3 June.

In the wake of last week's election- related protests, the Ethiopian government's crackdown on potential sources of unrest has spread throughout the country, Human Rights Watch says. While international attention has focused on events in Addis Ababa, opposition members and students in other cities are increasingly at risk of arbitrary arrest and torture. The current wave of arrests followed a chaotic week in Addis Ababa that saw security forces put down a series of election-related protests with excessive force.

An estimated 23,000 people have fled their homes in the last week in the western Burundi's Bubanza Province because of fighting between government soldiers and rebels of the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL). "Many of the displaced people have been without food for more than a week," Fidèle Niyongabo, the communal administrator of Mpanda, told IRIN. He said fighting occurred again there on Tuesday.

Rape, sexual attacks and child abuse are common in northern Uganda's biggest refugee camp, where tens of thousands of people shelter from 19 years of war, the United Nations children's agency said. Some 1.6 million northerners have been uprooted by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebellion, triggering a crisis aid workers have called the world's worst neglected emergency. They live in squalid, sprawling settlements where overcrowding, despair and a "culture of silence" allow sexual violence to thrive, especially against children, a study by UNICEF and local officials said.

The number of refugees around the world rose by one million in 2004, to 11.5 million, according to the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. People fleeing Sudan's troubled Darfur region to Chad and Iraqis crossing into Syria contributed to the increase, the private aid group said in its annual survey. Last year the committee started a campaign to end the protracted encampment of refugees, a practice it labelled "warehousing."

Nearly 100 refugees from various African countries were detained in Zimbabwe as part of an ongoing police blitz on illegal housing, a newspaper reported. Ninety-four people from Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Mozambique and Rwanda handed themselves over to immigration officials after shack homes they had been living in were demolished in Harare, the state-controlled Herald reported.

This broad-ranging study was designed to assist DFID in defining a coherent policy position to inform its dealings with and on behalf of refugees and internally displaced persons. Additional expertise was sought through a series of commissioned papers. Consultations were also carried out with representatives of governments, NGOs and international agencies.

The right of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) to return to their homes and places of habitual residence and to have their property restored to them has been recognized by the UN Security Council in relation to a number of conflicts and has been included in a number of peace agreements. Nevertheless, NRC's own experiences indicate that enforcement of this right remains patchy. The purpose of this paper is to document NRC's own experiences of attempting to uphold HLP rights in the different settings where NRC has programs.

Scientists are warning that dramatic changes may soon occur in Africa’s vegetation in response to global warming. They believe the effect may be on a similar scale to the climatic disruption in the last Ice Age and the African forest decline 2,500 years ago. Dr Jon Lovett, who led the research, said: “The results were extraordinary – plants migrate out of the Congo rainforests and there is a massive intensification of drought in the Sahel. Other areas particularly hard hit are eastern Africa and the south-west coast.”

The Sudanese government resumed face-to-face peace talks with the two main rebel movements in its western Darfur region on Monday after three days of bickering over whether representatives from Chad and Eritrea should be allowed to attend, officials involved in the negotiations said. The latest round of peace talks mediated by the African Union (AU) officially began in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Friday following a six-month break.

International agencies are pressing Liberia's interim government to crack down on corruption because it is undermining the peace process in the troubled West African nation, the United Nations said on Monday. A plan to improve economic governance in Liberia was drawn up last month in Copenhagen by officials of the United Nations, European Commission, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the West African economic bloc ECOWAS and the United States, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.

The injury of three persons, two seriously, in western Cote d'Ivoire last week reflects the deep-seated animosity between some ethnic groups in this West African country. The fighting, in reprisal for the death of four people, occurred in Duekoue, 400 kilometres west of the commercial capital of Abidjan. Recently more than 100 Gueres, who are indigenous to the region, were cut to pieces with machetes and sprayed with bullets. The incidents occurred at Guitrozon and Petit Duekoue, the villages adjacent to the city of Duekoue.