Amnesty International has accused armed Tuaregs and groups fighting to impose Sharia law in northern Mali of carrying out grave rights abuses such as rape, murder and using child soldiers. A report released by the London-based rights group said government soldiers had also carried out extrajudicial killings, branding the crisis Mali's worst human rights situation in 50 years.

A tenuous peace has taken hold in Libya’s southwestern city of Sebha more than a month after tribal clashes killed at least 70 people, with tensions still high between communities living here, many of whom have their own armed militias, according to local residents. The latest clashes erupted in March between the Tubu ethnic group and the Arab Awlad Sulayman and Awlad Abu Seif tribes. The clashes are said to have begun after a man belonging to the Abu Seif family was killed allegedly by the Tubu. But other narratives suggest the conflict followed a dispute over several million dollars which the ruling Transitional National Council (TNC) was planning to spend in Sebha.

A Zimbabwean human rights group has threatened South Africa's chief crime fighting unit with international legal action, over on ongoing probe into the illegal renditions of Zimbabwean citizens from South Africa. Several senior officials in the Hawks criminal unit and the South African police were last year accused of conducting the renditions, in partnership with Zimbabwean police. This has reportedly led to a number of Zimbabwean 'suspects' being arrested in South Africa and then sent across the border illegally, and killed. The Zimbabwe Exiles Forum (ZEF) has also threatened to refer the Hawks members involved to the International Criminal Court (ICC) if they are not brought to justice, explaining that a thorough, credible investigation needs to done.

Patricia de Lille has the next few days in which to come up with answers for angry Sir Lowry’s Pass Village residents who threw stones at police and motorists. They also tried to burn down the local satellite police station by lobbing petrol bombs at it. Hundreds of residents protested last week, demanding service delivery in an area they claim has been ignored by the City of Cape Town for the past 10 years.

The Washington Post reports that since 2007, the US State Department has trained about 35,000 African soldiers for an international force in Somalia, mostly deployed to Mogadishu. The African Union is planning to expand its Somalia force from 12,000 to 18,000, the majority of the troops US-trained. Training has occurred at these three primary sites.

Thousands of Mauritanian opposition activists staged a march and sit-down protest in Nouakchott Wednesday evening 9 May, calling for former coup leader President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz to step down. The turnout was larger than on May 2, when the demonstrators tried to occupy a square in the centre of the capital before being dispersed by security forces.

The first group of ethnic South Sudanese among up to 15,000 camped in crowded conditions in Sudan has begun their journey home. Roughly 400 people, mostly adults, travelled to Khartoum by bus on Saturday (12 May) from a town 300 kilometres south of the capital ahead of a major airlift that had been planned for early Sunday, said Jill Helke, country director for the International Organisation for Migration.

As dusk settles over the isolated Saharan town Kufra, young guards order a few hundred migrants lined up at a detention centre to chant 'Libya free, Chadians out', before they kneel down for evening prayers. Most of the prisoners in the small, squalid compound called the Freedom Detention Centre – run by Kufra’s military council – are from Chad. Hundreds more, from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia, were moved to bigger facilities due to overcrowding.

Former president FW de Klerk must retract comments he made in a CNN interview, the Council for the Advancement of the SA Constitution (Casac) said on Saturday. 'Casac condemns in the strongest terms the reckless attempts by former president FW de Klerk to justify and defend the apartheid system,' it said in a statement. 'The very notion of 'separate development' was at the centre of the apartheid ideology, and was predicated on notions of racist supremacy as was Nazism.'

The African Commission of Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) has issued a stinging rebuke to the Swazi government - and called on it to respect human rights and take all necessary measures to ensure the conduct of free, fair and credible elections in 2013. The Swazi Media Blogspot says even though the Swazi authorities seem immune to most criticism of their anti-democratic antics and their contempt for human rights, they will surely be embarrassed to read that the Commission is deeply concerned and even alarmed by some of their actions.

Soldiers loyal to general Bosco Ntanganda have formed a new rebel movement called M23, civil society groups in eastern DR Congo said. The movement's name is in reference to the peace accord that was signed on March 23, 2009 and which enabled the rebels of the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) to be integrated into the DR Congo Armed Forces (FARDC). It is believed that Ntanganda and his associates formed this rebel movement to reposition themselves on the political scene once the institutions that are formed after the elections have been established.

High Court orders South African authorities to investigate crimes against humanity committed by state officials in Zimbabwe.

Rebels in Sudan's western Darfur region said on Tuesday (8 May) they had seized control of a town from Sudanese government troops, part of their campaign to topple President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's government. 'Our forces entered Girayda, south of Nyala, and took over the garrison completely,' Abdullah Mursal, spokesman for the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) faction led by Minni Minnawi, said.

The UN refugee agency has launched a repatriation programme for tens of thousands of refugees who want to return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo from neighbouring Republic of the Congo. In a low-key start to the operation, a small convoy of boats took 79 refugees down the Oubangui River from the town of Betou in Republic of the Congo (ROC) to Dongo in northern Democratic Republic of the Congo's Equateur province. UNHCR and senior officials of the two countries are expected to take part in a formal ceremony later.

Egypt’s parliament on 6 May 2012 approved amendments to the Code of Military Justice that failed to end the unprecedented expansion of military trials of civilians, despite pleas for reform from the legal and human rights communities, Human Rights Watch said. In 2011 more than 12,000 civilians, including children, faced unfair military trials which fail to provide the basic due process rights of civilian courts, more than the number of military trials of civilians during 30 years of rule by former president Hosni Mubarak.

The two weeks since Egypt's abrupt cancellation of a Mubarak-era gas-export deal with Israel have seen an exchange of indirect threats and warnings between the two countries, culminating in an apparent Israeli military build-up on the border of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. 'In recent days, Israel appears to have begun preparing for military deployments on its southern border,' Tarek Fahmi, head of the Israel desk at the Cairo-based National Centre for Middle East Studies, told IPS.

An assault on the Libyan interim government headquarters has left one guard dead and several others wounded, according to reports. Fighters attacked and surrounded the building on Tuesday 8 May, demanding stipends that the government promised to pay to those who helped oust former leader Muammar Gaddafi. Nasser al-Manaa, an interim government spokesperson, said the armed protesters, some of them carrying mortars, tried to push their way into the building.

In the dusty courtyard of a crowded clinic in Old Fangak, in South Sudan’s Jonglei state, throngs of people, some of them under mosquito nets strung between trees, wait to get tested for kala-azar, amid the worst continuous outbreak in three decades. Last year, this clinic – which lacks electricity or running water - handled around half the 11,000 total recorded cases of the parasitical disease, also known as visceral leishmaniasis. Spread by the bite of the sand-fly, it can cause fever, weight loss, enlarged spleen, rash, anaemeia, diarrhoea, fatigue and, left untreated, death.

South Africa should investigate whether officials in neighboring Zimbabwe are responsible for human rights abuses there, a judge said Tuesday 8 May in an order that has grave political and practical implications. The ruling handed down in a Pretoria court Tuesday by Judge Hans Fabricius was the first under South African statutes spelling out its international law obligations. Human rights lawyer Nicole Fritz, whose South African Litigation Centre joined the Zimbabwean Exiles forum to bring the suit, said human rights groups have documented cases of torture and other crimes in Zimbabwe. Under Tuesday's order, she said, investigators from a country with a strong legal framework now will be able to hold Zimbabwean officials responsible for crimes allegedly committed during that country's political meltdown.

Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan’s office rejected accusations Okah made in Monday’s request for bail in South Africa, where he was arrested and will stand trial for bombings in Nigeria’s capital that killed 12 people during 2010 independence celebrations. In the bail request made available on Monday, Okah said Jonathan’s government orchestrated the bombing to eliminate a rival and to fan ethnic tensions for political gain. Okah has been jailed in South Africa since being arrested here shortly after the October, 2010 bombings.