Activist Adolfo Campos André, aged 32, survived an attack on 15 June. Two Toyota Landcruisers blocked his car, a Chevrolet Spark, in Petrangol Road in Luanda. According to his statement, two of the individuals struck him on the face with the ends of their guns at the same time, leaving him with injuries next to his right eye. Adolfo André has organised youth demonstrations against the long tenure of president José Eduardo dos Santos, who has been in office since 1979.

Abubakar Mohamed Mahamud has worked with Somali refugees in northeastern Kenya since the war in Somalia began more than 20 years ago. Originally a nurse specializing in nutrition, he is now Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)’s deputy field coordinator. 'MSF has continued to work in the camps with Kenyan and refugee staff, providing both primary and secondary health care to the new refugees. However, should there be an emergency situation like the 2011 malnutrition crisis, it will be very difficult to cope. The international community needs to find a solution for this desperate situation. They need to understand the complexity of the situation and the desperation in which people are living.'

ARTICLE 19 has welcomed the tabling of a proposed law on Internal Displacement for discussion in the Kenyan parliament and calls for its swift adoption by the Parliament, at a time when Kenya is heading into another election period. The Internally Displaced Persons Bill 2012, tabled by the Chairperson of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Resettlement, Hon Ekwee Ethuro on 13th June 2012, was developed under the leadership of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Resettlement. It was reviewed for consistency with relevant instruments and standards during a meeting of all major stakeholders including ARTICLE 19, UNHCR, the Refugee Consortium of Kenya (RCK), the Kenya National Human Rights Commission (KNHCR) and the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) in Mombasa in November 2011.

The European Parliament sent a bold message to the world last week with its comprehensive and ambitious resolution to put an end to the illicit global arms trade. But analysts regret the new resolution ignores several key factors, such as the impact of the arms trade on the socio-economic development of recipient countries, and the involvement of civil society in future negotiations. Next month member states will gather at the United Nations headquarters in New York to negotiate the first binding Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a potentially ground-breaking humanitarian treaty regulating international trade in conventional weapons. Currently, there is no universal set of rules controlling the global arms trade.

An al-Shabab suicide bomber has rammed a vehicle packed with explosives into the gate of a Somali government base in Afgoye, west of Mogadishu, the capital, causing casualties. Al-Shabab said its suicide bomber had 'killed dozens' in Saturday's attack, while the police said the blast had only wounded three soldiers. The figures could not be independently verified. Many parties in the Somalia conflict tend to exaggerate enemy losses and minimise their own.

The United States military is expanding a secret network of air bases across Africa in order to spy on al-Qaeda and other such groups, a US newspaper said. The surveillance is carried out by small, unmarked turboprop planes with hidden state-of-the-art sensors that fly thousands of kilometres between air bases and bush landing strips across the vast continent, the Washington Post reported.

Libya's government has sent troops to put an end to six days of clashes between rival armed groups in the west of the country. The fighting, which left least 16 people killed and scores of others injured, is the latest episode of instability eight months since the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi's regime after a months-long conflict. As it seeks to impose its authority on a fractious country, Libya's new leadership on Saturday called for an immediate ceasefire in the fighting south of the capital Tripoli.

Three blasts have hit churches in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna in the latest apparent attacks targeting Christian worshippers in the region, emergency services and residents said. All of the blasts happened close to the city of Zaria. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties in Sunday's blasts, but residents said they feared many people had been killed.

Transparency International, the anti-corruption organisation, calls for the government of Gabon to uphold civil society’s right to peaceful activism following the detention last week of more than 40 people, including Grégory Ngbwa Mintsa, the 2010 recipient of the Transparency International Integrity Award. The civil society activists, who were taken into custody on 8 June and later released, were planning an alternative forum to a government-sponsored New York Forum Africa, a regional event to promote Gabon. The activists wanted to highlight the challenges ordinary citizens face in Gabon. Freedom of expression and the space for a vibrant civil society are essential in any country to ensure a government is accountable to its people.

Key stakeholders meeting on 14 June to discuss the future of Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya acknowledge that there are tough choices ahead, but no agreed way forward. The panel discussion, entitled 'Dadaab 20 years on: what next?', was organized by NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Nairobi, and included government officials, UN agencies, NGOs and representatives from Dadaab's refugee community. Dadaab, originally built to house 90,000 refugees, currently hosts close to 500,000.

Sudanese refugees have started dying as a camp in South Sudan ran out of water four days ago after a massive influx of people fled across the border to escape war and hunger. The refugees are fleeing Sudan’s Blue Nile state where insurgents are fighting to overthrow the Sudanese government.

Nigeria has a war boat, but it raises numerous questions in the minds of the inquisitive.

Armed militants hostile to the Ivorian government have recruited Liberian children and carried out deadly cross-border raids on Ivorian villages in recent months, Human Rights Watch says. Liberian authorities have failed to investigate and prosecute dozens of Liberian and Ivorian nationals who crossed into Liberia after committing war crimes during Côte d’Ivoire’s 2010-2011 post-election crisis, some of whom have been implicated in the recent attacks, Human Rights Watch said.

Burundi has announced the setting up of a committee to investigate alleged cases of extra-judicial executions in the country. Public prosecutor Valentin Bagorikunda announced that a committe of six magistrates of the Public prosecutor's office would investigate allegations made over the past few months by national and international human rights organizations.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has sought a 30-year sentence for Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga. In March, the Hague-based court found him guilty of recruiting and using child soldiers between 2002 and 2003. At that time, an inter-ethnic conflict was raging in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lubanga headed a rebel group.

The long-running spat between the African Union (AU) and International Criminal Court (ICC) over perceived bias has prompted the AU to push ahead with plans to form its own Africa-wide criminal court, but analysts believe the move could complicate, rather than enhance, international justice. 'Africa wants regional ownership of its crimes and its leaders,' Alan Wallis, an international justice lawyer at the Johannesburg-based Southern African Litigation Centre (SALC), told IRIN, but pointed out: 'There is a misbelief [by the AU] that Africa is being targeted, as all cases before the ICC concern African situations, but this ignores the fact that of those six [cases], three were referred to the ICC by the countries concerned.'

Tunisia's government has condemned as 'terrorism' a spate of overnight attacks on courts and other state buildings by gangs including Islamist hardliners and vowed to punish them. The ultra-conservative Salafists denied involvement in the rampage in several areas of the capital Tunis and in the country's northwest, and instead called a protest after this week's Friday prayers.

This article from the Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration explores the ways in which Eritrean asylum-seekers in Israel narrate their experiences of suffering. These narrators were held hostage in the borderlands of the Northern Sinai desert by human traffickers for indefinite periods of time en route to Israel. Numerous Eritrean asylum-seekers experience and bear witness to torture, kidnapping, extortion, rape, and organ removal during the journey.

On 28 May 2012, a group of organisations wrote to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to request that it urgently investigate the state of health and health care service provision at Lindela Repatriation Centre (Lindela). Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), SECTION27, Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), and People against Suffering, Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP) requested a response from the SAHRC by 11 June 2012. To date, they have not received a response. Recent reports of violent protests within Lindela add even further urgency and credence to the request and the need to ensure that health and health rights are protected. Therefore, the organisations are now making the request public.

The parliament in Burkina Faso has granted amnesty to President Blaise Compaore and all of the country's previous heads of state. The immunity from prosecution will cover all presidents since independence from France in 1960. President Compaore came to power in a 1987 coup in which popular leader Thomas Sankara was killed.