There are fears that large numbers of children may be trafficked into Britain after police discovered up to 30 had been "lost". The BBC has learnt the Metropolitan Police investigation looked at children who came through Heathrow Airport with adults who were not their parents. Until recently few checks have been made by immigration at the airport. Campaigners fear thousands of children are being used as domestic slaves after being brought into Britain. The vast majority of the children were from Nigeria, which is well known among law enforcement officials as being the main source for trafficked children into Britain.

Ten thousand people have fled ethnic fighting in western Ethiopia that has claimed more than 250 lives, according to government officials. Clashes had erupted at a gold mine, in which 196 people were killed in a single day; the killings being one of the worst instances of ethnic violence seen in Ethiopia in recent years, the government said on Wednesday. The fighting flared up just weeks after 60 people were killed in the troubled Gambella region, the federal affairs ministry said in a statement.

Humanitarian access to western Sudan's war-torn Darfur region remains limited despite government claims to have opened relief routes, say humanitarian sources. "There is absolutely no access to any place, no humanitarian access," said the advocacy group Refugees International, quoting an agency trying to bring supplies to Darfur. "Things are not changing at all. If they are changing, they are changing for the worse."

This paper from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics discusses the proposal that poverty ought to be regarded as a violation of human rights and therefore as a condition that ought to be abolished. This proposal has been presented as a new paradigm in the fight against poverty that has the potential to galvanise an effective strategy for ending poverty through an international human rights framework. The essay explores this proposal from a philosophical standpoint, and argues that the proposal would be strengthened by including compassion or humanitarianism as part of its moral basis and achieved without diluting either the moral force or the radical implications of regarding poverty as a violation of human rights.

In many of today’s conflicts, adolescents represent the majority of children who fight or are associated with armed forces and groups; however, they are often ineligible for demobilisation programs for child soldiers as they become adults in the ranks of armed groups, missing the opportunity for rehabilitation and reintegration into a peaceful community. Lingering wars can destroy most of the economic and social infrastructure of countries and exacerbate the privation of the populations involved, leading to voluntary recruitment of adolescents. As greater and greater portions of the Gross Domestic Product of countries go to war efforts, less and less of the public budget is allocated to education or health. For an increasing number of youngsters, there is no other school than a military training camp and the only way for them and their families to thrive or to be safe is to be associated with armed groups.

Nigeria and other developing countries have been advised on strategies to employ to ensure that their interest is protected at the next World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting coming up end of 2004 or early 2005 in Hong Kong. Ms Aileen Kwa a trade analyst with Focus on the Global South, based in Geneva, noted in a statement sent to Vanguard that the developing countries' negotiators, trade unions and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have worked very hard since the WTO's inception to improve upon its inequitable rule, but still, the rules have not been changed to their benefit in any way.

A recent meeting brought together 125 participants from 34 countries to strategise against the proliferation of US military bases worldwide as a result of the "war on terror". The meeting provided a space for people to share their experiences living with US military presence and present their own local struggles to confront it. More importantly, the conference gave them an opportunity to put their heads together and begin thinking about a joint and collectively coordinated global campaign against US bases.

Big brand companies and retailers in the fashion and food industries are driving down employment conditions for millions of women workers around the world, according to a new study by international agency Oxfam. Oxfam says that huge retailing “empires” are undermining the very labour standards they claim to uphold by using a common business model that demands ever-quicker and cheaper delivery of the freshest and latest products.

100 Ways of Seeing an Unequal World actually offers 123 perspectives on world inequality, each consisting of a two-page presentation with a graph or graphs on the left and explanation and interpretation on the right. The topics covered range across production, income and trade, demographics and health, agriculture, environment, refugees and repression. Sutcliffe pays special attention to regional (rather than just international) and gender inequalities, and attempts to set comparisons in a historical perspective.

Fifty years after the adoption of the UN Convention on Refugees, the decade we live in has seen more of the world's people than ever before seeking refuge from war, persecution or disaster. This special report tells the stories behind the statistics, using first-person testimonies and in-depth interviews to trace the journey from home into exile. It asks why refugees are still fleeing, where they go, and examines how we treat them.

Major global computer companies are now embracing Linux. IBM, for one, is currently running a series of television and online ads proclaiming that the future is open, as in open source computing.

"The survival of the human species depends on biological diversity. Without biodiversity, there would be no trees to produce oxygen, no water catchments and no biodegradation, so that organic waste would just accumulate," says Hamdallah Zedan, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. "The services provided by biodiversity are inestimable and yet, because they are free, they are often overlooked, to the point where biodiversity is still being lost at an alarming rate." Zedan is in Kuala Lumpur at the Putra World Trade Centre with more than 2,000 delegates from around the world for the opening of the seventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP7).

Just the item security of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos cost nearly 18 million dollars. 2,000 people attended, among which CEOs of the largest global corporations and politicians of more than 100 countries, plus international journalists. In Mumbai, one member of the Swiss delegation interviewed the Chief of Police and learned that, in order to guarantee the safety of more than 100,000 people 700 policemen were on the streets. In Davos, 7,000 policemen, soldiers and agents, including the Swiss Air Forces, armed to their teeth, were mobilize to protect the world’s 2,000 richest and most powerful persons.

The General Assembly of the Global Anti-War Movement has called on the world to fill the streets on March 20 to demand an end to the occupation of Iraq. The General Assembly of the Anti-War Movement convened on January 19 at the World Social Forum (WSF) in Mumbai, India. Meeting for the whole day, the Assembly began with an assessment of the current political situation, followed by reports from various activists involved in various anti-war movements around the world. The Assembly ended with the call for an International Day of Action on March 20, the anniversary of the attack on Iraq. It calls for all movements in all continents to organize mass protests on that day to demand the end of the occupation of Iraq.

Can extreme, violent video games influence people's actions? Can playing a killer make you a killer?

It's been a week of gloom and MyDoom for computer boffins struggling to battle the world's fastest-spreading email worm.

Most refugees spend years living in border zones, in unsatisfactory and unsafe circumstances, with few means to support or educate themselves and their children, and few prospects. Their legal status in the host country is uncertain. They are not granted full asylum, nor are they likely to be resettled in a third country. These protracted refugee situations are characterized by a "care and maintenance" or "warehousing" model of assistance in countries of first asylum, meaning that the basic needs of refugees residing in camps are met. Local integration is a currently neglected, long-term solution that presents an alternative to refugee camps.

International donors gathering at the United Nations this week can best help Liberia by pledging funds to rehabilitate its tens of thousands of child soldiers, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released on Monday. The 43-page report, “How to Fight, How to Kill: Child Soldiers in Liberia,” documents how more than 15,000 child soldiers fought on all sides of the Liberian civil war, and that many units were composed primarily of children. The report argues that establishing a firm peace in the West African nation will depend on the successful reintegration of child soldiers into civil society.

The Lusaka High Court has ruled that it was wrong for former president Frederick Chiluba to award houses bought with public funds to lawyers Vincent Malambo and Eric Silwamba after they represented him in the 1996 presidential election petition. Judge Christopher Mushabati said this in the case in which Malambo and Silwamba were contesting the seizure of their houses by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC).

This article on Women’s Human Rights Net explores the legal international advancements concerning the sexual rights of all people, and women's in particular, as well as the threats, challenges and opportunities of these achievements that go hand in hand with cultural progress. It also presents related international mechanisms and instruments and facts and figures that reflect violations to these rights. Various bodies of the United Nations system, among these the UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR), the Reports by the Special Rapporteur on Summary and Arbitrary Executions, the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, have interpreted the right to respect for private life, gender-based discrimination or categories such as "other condition or status" as inclusive of sexual orientation. They have also spoken of the importance of "sexual rights" within the human rights framework.