The on-line dialogue Documenting Violations: Choosing the Right Approach, organised by New Tactics, took place from 27 January to 2 February 2010. The dialogue featured practitioners that have developed database systems to document human rights violations, organisations on the ground documenting violations, and those that are training practitioners on how to choose the right approach and system for their documentation. We looked at options for ways to collect, store and share your human rights data safely and effectively.

Mbariza Ntore” (Kirundi for “inform us so that we can vote”) is a media support project of the Dutch NGO, La Benevolencija, set up with a total of 18 different media houses (radio, print press, TV, Internet and news agency) in Burundi. The project enhances the capacity of citizens to better understand the conditions in which they are being invited to fulfill their political rights.

Each year between 50 000 to 100 000 women worldwide are affected by obstetric fistula, a hole in the birth canal. The development of obstetric fistula is directly linked to one of the major causes of maternal mortality: obstructed labour.

Voices of Dissent. Activists Engagements in the Creation of Alternative, Autonomous, Radical and Independent Media.
Interface is a new journal produced twice yearly by activists and academics around the world in response to the development and increased visibility of social movements in the last few years – and the immense amount of knowledge generated in this process. This knowledge is created across the globe, and in many contexts and a variety of ways, and it constitutes an incredibly valuable resource for the further development of social movements. Interface responds to this need, as a tool to help our movements learn from each other’s struggles, by developing analyses and knowledge that allow lessons to be learned from specific movement processes and experiences and translated into a form useful for other movements.

The Africa Initiative of Syracuse University, recognizes the need for the debate on Africa-China relations to transcend the emerging Sino-phobic scholarship and analyses that conceptualize Africa-China relations only through the limited lens of exploitation, new imperialism and anti-democracy. Towards this end, the Africa Initiative will host a select group of distinguished scholars to assess and deliberate on the nature and future of Sino-African relations and cooperation. This special symposium will be held from 8th-10th April 2010 in the main campus of Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

Featuring Norah Matovu-Winyi, Monica Amollo and Pollyne Owoko, of a United Nations 'global conversation' video-stream on women's rights, gender equality and maternal health. Drawing on their experiences as gender activists, the participants discuss the women's movement, meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the future challenges for achieving sexual equality in Kenya.

Domestic workers around the world are organizing to challenge the harsh, abusive, often slave-like conditions in which they work. They are organizing unions and support networks, and they are mobilizing in support of an international Convention that will finally recognize them as workers and establish their rights in international law.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya's (UOC) Department of Food Systems, Culture and Society are partnering to offer a fully accredited, online certificate in Food Security: Assessment and Action.

This International Women's Day, we not only mark the 3 year anniversary of the Women WON'T wait. End HIV and Violence Against Women. NOW. campaign, but also reflect on where we are since the historic 4th World Conference on Women in 1995. The Beijing Platform of Action contained milestone commitments to the world’s women, such as the possibility of a future where it was possible to end all forms of violence against women; women’s poverty and our unequal share of caring work within and outside the home; as well as socio-cultural discrimination, sexual disciplining, and political exclusions of various categories of people, including women.

EG Justice Needs Your Help.

now to STOP the UNESCO-Obiang International Prize for the Life Sciences.

In 2008, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) created the UNESCO-Obiang International Prize for the Life Sciences, named for and financed by the autocratic and abusive president of the oil-rich West African country of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

The prize is said to recognize 'scientific achievements that improve the quality of human life.' Meanwhile, the quality of life in Equatorial Guinea today remains abysmal. In spite of having attained the highest GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa, 60 per cent of Equatoguineans live on less than US$1 a day in conditions comparable to Haiti or Chad. President Obiang has neglected to invest available resources in basic social services, resulting in declining primary school attendance, poor health indicators, and needless poverty.

The UNESCO Obiang Prize is a cynical ploy to co-opt the worthy name and reputation of UNESCO to enhance the image of a notorious dictatorship. The prize amounts to international approval for this kleptocratic and abusive regime and it undermines UNESCO’s mission to promote education, science, culture, and human rights.

You can help, by signing this petition to UNESCO!

Let’s send a message to UNESCO that corruption and abuse should not be rewarded and that funds used to create this prize should be reinvested in the people of Equatorial Guinea.

Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) is deeply concerned at the continued restrictions and threats to opposition parties in the run-up to Rwanda’s presidential elections on 9 August 2010 and urges the Rwandan government to take immediate steps to ensure respect for the basic, universal rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association and peaceful assembly of opposition parties. The absence of these rights is tantamount to breaches of the Commonwealth’s fundamental political principles that insist on free and fair elections (Harare Declaration 1991).

Coinciding with International Women's Day, a group of personalities from the United States have sent a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, asking them to immediately grant humanitarian visas to two Cuban women so they can visit their husbands in US prisons.

More than a dozen people were killed and many more were hurt when two clans clashed in central Somalia, residents and community elders said on Friday. The Qubeys clan and the Suleyman sub-clan of the Habargidir clan started fighting the previous day in Amara village, 90 km north of the pirate base town of Haradheeere. The fight was over a dispute over land ownership.

Federal Government has said henceforth, patients attending Federal Government Hospitals can now report on the quality of services through SMS. With the support of MTN and Glo GSM Networks, who are providing the platform with which the service are being provided, the Federal Ministry of Health said it is poised to check the activities of quacks through the Patients' Feedback Platform with the generic shortcode 30500.

Kenyan women are becoming infected with HIV during pregnancy at very high rates, and repeat testing prior to delivery, or at the earliest possible opportunity after birth, should be encouraged in order to reduce mother-to-child transmission, Kenyan researchers reported last week at the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in San Francisco.

A severe shortage of highly-trained medical personnel is one of the many challenges to providing health care at a local level across Africa. Task shifting - permitting less-specialized people to carry out certain functions - is one proposal to over come this, but it is meeting resistance.

An online petition containing more than 450,000 signatures has been presented to the Uganda Parliament, urging members to withdraw a proposed bill that, if passed, would broaden the criminalization of homosexuality in the East African country and introduce the death penalty in certain cases.

A new initiative to bring environmental and financial benefits to local communities in the impoverished highlands of Ethiopia has been announced in Ethiopia. The Humbo Assisted Natural Regeneration Project is Africa's first large-scale forestry project to be registered under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. It will bring both economic and social benefits to poor communities in Ethiopia as well as environmental benefits as the project will cut an estimated 880,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 30 years.

The government of Sierra Leone has announced that from Independence Day (27 April) it will abolish user fees for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five, but will this, on its own, improve their lot?

Africa's economic growth could be held back for another generation unless global investors help the world's poorest continent to improve its unreliable energy networks, a British minister has said.