Dr Amadou Scattered Janneh, a detained former Minister of Information and Communication and three others have been charged with treason for allegedly distributing anti-Jammeh materials, demanding an end to the authoritarian rule of President Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia. Dr Janneh, an outspoken former minister went missing after his arrest on 7 June 2011. Dr. Janneh was whisked towards Banjul, the capital to an unknown location. On 13 June 2001, he was seen publicly for the first time after his arrest.

Minority Rights Group International has expressed serious concern regarding the worsening situation of Nuba people trapped and displaced in recent heavy fighting in South Kordofan. Fighting during the last couple of weeks in South Kordofan has left approximately 60,000 displaced and there are reports emerging of serious human rights violations directed at Nuba people, MRG says.

On 16 June the government of Chad signed an action plan to end recruitment and use of children in its national army and security forces. The new action plan is an agreement between the Chadian Government and the United Nations to end recruitment and use of child soldiers. The action plan spells out concrete steps, which when taken, will result in Chad being removed from the Secretary-General’s list of parties who recruit and use children.

The Egyptian authorities must earn the trust of the people by abolishing repressive laws and ending abusive practices, the Secretary General of Amnesty International said in Cairo. Speaking after his week-long visit to Egypt, his first official trip to the Middle East and North Africa, Salil Shetty called on the Egyptian authorities, including the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), to use the post-Mubarak transition period to carry out urgent reforms and lift new repressive steps such as the law banning strikes and the use of military trials against civilians.

The UNHCR says it is alarmed by a dramatic rise in the number of new refugee arrivals from Somalia into Kenya. Over the past two weeks the Dadaab refugee complex in northern Kenya has received more than 20,000 Somali refugees. The new arrivals are mostly farmers and animal herders from Lower Juba and the city of Dhobley. During 2010, Dadaab received an average of 6,000 to 8,000 Somalis every month. This year the monthly average has increased to 10,000 refugees.

Judges at the UN court for Rwanda have sentenced a former Rwandan minister for women's affairs, to life in prison for genocide and incitement to rape. The ruling by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) means that Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, 65, is the first women to be ever convicted of genocide. She was found guilty on seven of the 11 genocide charges she faced for atrocities committed in Rwanda's southern Butare region in 1994.

Girl soldiers, who are often forced to marry militia commanders, tend to have difficulties leaving and reintegrating into civilian life. In 2004, the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF launched a national programme to help former child soldiers adjust to their new circumstances. But since it started, only two per cent of those it has assisted have been women. Juvénal Munubo, head of a child soldiers reintegration programme for the NGO Caritas in Goma, eastern DRC, argues that this is disproportionally low, compared to the number of women that are estimated to be members armed units.

Bandits, militias, and alleged abuses by the army are causing access problems for aid workers trying to help large concentrations of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the territory of Irumu, part of the Ituri region in northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Among the 130,000 IDPs in the Ituri region, 89,864 (69 per cent) are in the territory of Irumu, about 40km southwest of Bunia, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Cote d’Ivoire authorities have released 17 associates of deposed president Laurent Gbagbo who had been detained inside an Abidjan hotel. Gbagbo and his wife Simone and about 50 of their relatives and associates, remain under house arrest in five cities across the country. According to the Justice ministry, they could be charged as early as this week. They face charges of economic mismanagement, and involvement in post-election violence or collaboration with an 'illegitimate' regime.

North and south Sudan have signed an agreement to demilitarise the disputed Abyei region and allow in Ethiopian peacekeeping forces, former South African president Thabo Mbeki said on 20 June.

The Hawks have stopped short of promising to reopen their investigation into the arms deal following last week's revelations that a R24-million alleged bribe was paid by a weapons dealer to a local 'consultant'. Last week the CEO of Swedish arms manufacturer Saab, Hakan Bushke, revealed that British Aerospace Systems had made a R24-million payment to a South African 'consultant' on the arms deal. But Hawks chief Anwar Dramat's spokesman, McIntosh Polela, would not be drawn on further details: 'We will assess the information and see where it takes us going forward.'

Safaricom subscribers can search for and reconnect with their loved ones using their mobile phone via an application provided by Ericsson and Refugees United. The system enables refugees to use mobile phones to register themselves, search for loved ones, and subsequently reconnect via an anonymous database.

In Mugunga, about 12km from Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), communities of Bambuti have been eking out a living at the edge of the city. The Bambuti are believed to be among Central Africa's oldest inhabitants, surviving from hunting and gathering. Among those living in Mugunga, some fled the war in eastern DRC in 2005 and others were evicted from their ancestral homes in Virunga National Park, home to DRC’s mountain gorillas.

The biggest refugee camp in the world is full, creating a humanitarian emergency that threatens thousands of malnourished children, Médecins sans Frontiéres (MSF) has warned. Dadaab, a sprawling desert 'city' in Kenya with a population expected to reach 450,000 by the end of the year, has run out of space, the medical charity said. Many children who fled war in neighbouring Somalia are without food or shelter in dry heat of 50°C.

NATO has acknowledged responsibility for an air strike that killed a number of civilians in Tripoli, the Libyan capital. A statement from the alliance said that a military missile site was the intended target of a raid on Sunday morning but one of the weapons did not strike it and may have caused civilian casualties. At a local hospital, reporters were shown three bodies, including a child, which government officials said were people killed in the air strike. 'Basically, this is another night of murder, terror and horror in Tripoli caused by NATO,' Moussa Ibrahim, a government spokesman, said at the hospital. Five families were living in the building which was hit, he said.

Damning video evidence has emerged, proving for the first time that sniper rifles made in South Africa are being used in Libya’s bloody civil war by forces loyal to embattled dictator Muammar Gaddafi, reports City Press newspaper. The revelations come amid continued refusals by South Africa to divulge the details of conventional arms sales to Libya’s repressive government – which totalled nearly R69 million last year.

A UNHCR report released on World Refugee Day reveals deep imbalance in international support for the world's forcibly displaced, with a full four-fifths of the world's refugees being hosted by developing countries - and at a time of rising anti-refugee sentiment in many industrialised ones. UNHCR's 2010 Global Trends report shows that many of the world's poorest countries are hosting huge refugee populations, both in absolute terms and in relation to the size of their economies. Pakistan, Iran and Syria have the largest refugee populations at 1.9 million, 1.1 million and 1 million respectively.

Fresh satellite images show the army amassing heavy weaponry in the capital of Sudan’s embattled northern oil state, suggesting that a major offensive could occur soon, monitors have said. The US monitoring group, which was set up by Hollywood star and rights activist George Clooney last year, said the satellites images that were taken on 17 June were the first to show thousands of people seeking shelter around the main UN compound near Kadugli. Heavy fighting has raged across South Kordofan since 5 June between the SAF and northern troops aligned to the army of the south that Khartoum has vowed to crush using all available means.

The website is a campaign to make ecocide - the destruction, damage or loss of ecosystems - a crime. 'You can help us close the door to the ecocide and open a new one to a clean green world. The more of us that stand up and call for ecocide to be made a crime the sooner our world will change for the better.' This involves demanding that ecocide be made a criminal offence, that
ecocide be made the 5th UN Crime Against Peace and that ecocide be eradicated.

According to the International Committee for the Development of Peoples (CISP), an estimated 10,961 Congolese were expelled from Angola in the month of May alone, 7,178 of whom have arrived in Kasai Occidental Province. The CISP figures have been validated by DRC’s General Department of Migration. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that 80,000 were expelled from Angola to DRC between January 2010 and March 2011. The expulsions are not a new phenomenon. From 2003 to 2009, 140,000 Congolese were deported from Angola, according to OCHA.