The International Criminal Court could begin investigations this year into war crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, following a request by the country's president, the ICC said. President Joseph Kabila sent a letter to Louis Moreno Ocampo, the court's chief prosecutor, asking him to look into alleged war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, the court said in a statement. When the court was launched last July, Ocampo said he intended to probe the situation in the war-torn Ituri region, and he has received six complaints of atrocities in the northeastern region since that time.

Thousands of Congolese refugees are still in Uganda more than a year after a peace deal was signed back home. The refugees are unwilling to return home for fear of ethnic reprisals because parts of eastern Congo, where the Hema and the Lendu – the principal actors in the tribal clashes from which they fled – are said to be still under the rule of warlords. The Congolese, estimated by the Uganda People's Defence Forces to be 10,000 in number, live in Bundibugyo district without refugee status. The Refugee Law Project (RLP) says that they are living in inhuman conditions.

Marratane camp has more than 30 churches to meet the spiritual and other needs of less than 5,000 refugees. Some say religion helps them overcome conflict, some simply enjoy the singing and dancing involved, while others are praying for resettlement to the west.

Early in the morning, when the fog lifts, the Land Cruiser carrying a team of three lawyers from the UN refugee agency leaves the town of Muyinga in north-eastern Burundi for one of the many hills covered by eucalyptus and firs. As soon as the car stops in an open space, the first "clients" arrive. They ask the lawyers for advice. Soon there are long queues of people hoping to find answers to myriad problems facing post-war Burundi. Normally, they are related to property and domestic disputes. Many returnees find their land and houses occupied. Others arrive with new families, causing tensions with those they had left behind. UNHCR set the legal clinic in motion to help find answers to these problems before they come to a boil.

Trafficking in Nigeria is seen as an everyday part of West African life. It starts with the promise of a better life. The parents are taken in. The children are persuaded. When they leave home they do so willingly, with some excitement, not trepidation. The trafficker has promised a good job, a schooling, a regular income. But that is not how it works out.

Up to 30,000 people, mostly women and children, have been displaced by fighting into the garrison town of Malakal in Upper Nile, Sudan, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the capital, Khartoum. A regional analyst told IRIN that up to 75,000 people were believed to have been displaced by conflict in the nearby Shilluk kingdom, which pits government-backed Nuer and Shilluk militias against the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The vast majority of the IDPs were women and children, who had arrived in the town with scant personal belongings, reporting looting, burning of villages, killing and rape, especially around Tonga, about 75 km west of Malakal, according to Nadia. The men are believed to have scattered into "the bush" to protect their cattle.

Thousands of people displaced by wars in neighbouring Sudan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have at different times poured into Uganda to seek refuge and rebuild their lives. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Uganda is currently hosting 18,000 refugees from Rwanda and some 171,000 from Sudan. It is harder to give exact figures for refugees from the DRC. UNHCR says that technically the war in eastern DRC has ended, but since migration between western Uganda and eastern DRC has been such a regular part of life in the region for centuries, it is impossible to estimate how many Congolese refugees live in western Uganda.

For nations moving from authoritarian to civilian rule, debate about whether to forget past human-rights abuses and focus on the future has always been emotive. Freed from prison in 1990 after 27 years, Nelson Mandela presided over South Africa’s attempt to put the atrocities of the apartheid era behind it through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. More recently, Sierra Leone’s truth commission has asked how combatants in the country’s brutal civil war could slice open the wombs of pregnant women and amputate villagers’ limbs in the name of a senseless civil war. Ghana, too, has opted for a National Reconciliation Commission to examine the abuses that took place under the leadership of President Jerry Rawlings.

The Ivorian opposition has agreed to reopen dialogue with President Laurent Gbagbo if a plan of reforms is met. The opposition left the government of national reconciliation around a rally last month in which at least 37 died. With both the president and prime minister agreeing to the bulk of their demands, the opposition has now agreed to reopen dialogue.

Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano received on Wednesday a delegation from the Portuguese section of the human rights body Amnesty International (AI) that is currently visiting Mozambique. Among the delegation's priorities is to request the Mozambican government to ratify the treaty creating the International Criminal Court, a supra-national tribunal that will be empowered to deal with war crimes.

Extreme care will have to be taken to ensure that Burundi’s forthcoming November election will strengthen and reinforce the progress that has been made thus far in securing peace rather than reversing the gains that have been made, argues a report from the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS). "In short, elections should not merely be regarded as a necessary formality in a country that is again trying to democratise. Far more is at stake. Any contestation of the election outcome and the conflict it may precipitate will merely further weaken the fragile belief that the present process can actually deliver durable peace," says the ICG.

HIV/AIDS prevention and conflict prevention should go hand in hand, states a new report from the International Crisis Group. "The correlation of HIV/AIDS and war is difficult to calculate with precision because the data are less than complete, and numerous interacting factors are at play. Nevertheless, the evidence available demonstrates that war can lead to increased risks of HIV/AIDS and suggests that HIV/AIDS can make conflicts worse," says the report.

Government has been accused of "trampling upon the human rights of its citizens". The accusation was made by Botswana Federation of Trade Unions (BFTU) secretary general Temogo Makgele when addressing Botswana Congress Party (BCP) third national congress in Ramotswa. Makgele said there were many contradictions in the country's democracy which government was reluctant to rectify.

A Canada-based representative of the Anuak Survival Organisation has given chilling testimony on a genocide being perpetrated against the Anuak people in Gambella Province, Ethiopia. Obang Metho spoke to a special UN Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva on April 8, 2004. Mr. Metho said, “I speak to you as the representative of a forgotten people, the Anuak (or Anywaa) of Ethiopia. We number only 100,000 persons in the Gambella province of south-western Ethiopia. Our province is the tongue of fertile land, rich with natural resources such as oil, gold and other minerals that extends into southern Sudan. In the past four months, over 1137 Anuak have been murdered by the Ethiopian defense forces and some others from the highland.”

Not enough thought and resources has been given to healing the wounds of survivors of the Rwandan genocide, says African Rights in a new report. "Many say that for them it is as if time has stood still - their everyday lives are still dominated by the genocide." African Rights said much more must urgently be done. "We issue a special plea to the international community to recognize in particular the unbearable suffering endured by the survivors of genocide and rape and their immediate need of assistance." The report 'Broken Bodies, Torn Spirits, Living with Genocide, Rape and HIV/AIDS' provides detailed testimony of the condition of genocide survivors.

The National Refugee Commission has approved the proposal of the Nigerian Popular Theatre Alliance (NPTA) and African Youth Parliament (AYP), Kenya, in collaboration with Movement for Cultural Awareness (MOCA) to hold a conflict management and transformation workshop with refugees at the Oru Camp, Ogun State.

Bishop Desmond Tutu famously described South Africa as the “Rainbow Nation” after the 1994 election. Ten years later, skin colour still profoundly divides and defines South Africa. Race colours the views of the new South Africa and its future, a Washington Post, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University survey has found. Two-thirds of blacks say the country is going in the right direction while majorities of coloured, Indians and whites disagree. Three in four blacks are optimistic about South Africa’s future - a view shared by fewer than half of all whites.

Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe should be held accountable for crimes against humanity, delegates attending the Second World Bar Conference of the Forum for Barristers and Advocates heard in Cape Town on Tuesday. "What is happening there could be summed up as a gross violation of human rights and Robert Mugabe and his henchmen must be made accountable for crimes against humanity," said Dato' Param Cumaraswamy, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers.

A local human rights organisation, Voice of The Voiceless, has claimed that at least 200 people of the Ngbandi ethnic group in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been arrested in connection with a recent attack by ex-soldiers of the nation's former army on several military and civilian installations. The chairman of the Kinshasa-based NGO, Floribert Chebeya, told IRIN on Monday that a government investigation into the incident had been "oriented" in a manner in which it seemed that only the Ngbandi people, the ethnic group of the late Congolese president, Mobutu Sese Seko, had been targeted.

Rebel forces occupying the north of Cote d'Ivoire have played down suggestions that they may declare a separate breakaway state following the latest setback to implementing a year-old peace agreement. Rebel leader Guillaume Soro told a rally in the rebel capital Bouake on 4 April that his "New Forces" movement had set up its own administration in the north and had got schools functioning again without the help of the government in Abidjan. The rebel authorities, he added, were even ready to pay regular salaries to their fighters for the first time.