The 2011 Right Livelihood jury has awarded Jacqueline Moudeina from Chad 'for her tireless efforts at great personal risk to win justice for the victims of the former dictatorship in Chad and to increase awareness and observance of human rights in Africa'. Moudeina is a lawyer who works fearlessly to bring the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré to justice making sure that those who committed crimes do not go unpunished. At the same time, she works on a wide range of human rights issues concerning Chad today. With her commitment to justice as prerequisite for reconciliation and her dedication to intervene from the grassroots level up to international jurisdiction, she has made a prominent and crucial contribution to winning respect for human rights in Africa.

'Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) proudly recognizes Khaled al-Hammadi (Yemen) and Mohamed Abdelfattah (Egypt) as this year’s recipients of the 2011 International Press Freedom Awards. The awards will be presented at the 14th annual CJFE Gala: A Night to Honour Courageous Reporting, to be held at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto on Thursday, November 24, 2011. These two journalists were chosen for their passion for free expression and their extraordinary courage. They did not let the many dangers they faced prevent them from working to expose the real story of what was taking place during the events we now call the Arab Spring.'

Since 11 September 2001, the US government has targeted Muslims in the United States by sending paid, untrained informants into mosques and Muslim communities. This practice has led to the prosecution of more than 200 individuals in terrorism-related cases. The government has touted these cases as successes in the so-called war against terrorism. This report from the NYU School of Law Center for Human Rights and Global Justice examines three high-profile terrorism prosecutions in which government informants played a critical role in instigating and constructing the plots that were then prosecuted. In all three cases, the FBI or New York City Police Department (NYPD) sent paid informants into Muslim communities or families without any particularised suspicion of criminal activity.

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

Following the election victory last week of Michael Sata, an outspoken critic of Chinese labour abuses in Zambia’s mining industry, Christian Science Monitor reports that one Chinese mine has given employees a sudden 85 per cent pay raise. It appears that the company prepared two different sets of paychecks, to be issued according to the election results.

Even before the Arab Spring had shown the power of the internet to accelerate the free flow of news and views and to bring like-minded citizens together to mobilize for change, authoritarian regimes had introduced extensive controls over digital media. Authoritarian regimes had built pervasive, multilayered systems for online censorship and surveillance. These systems have grown more diverse and sophisticated in the past two years, as documented in Freedom House's 2011 'Freedom on the Net' report and elsewhere.

Khadija Sharife takes a look at the links between Hong-Kong-based private entity China International Fund, Angola’s state oil company Sonangol and Zimbabwe’s diamond fields.

Khadija Sharife takes a closer look at the involvement of key players in Zanu PF’s Mugabe faction in a diamond-mining venture between the Zimbabwean government and Chinese company, Anhui Foreign Economic Construction Co. Ltd.

An appeal to the European and North American intelligentsia against the attack on the African peoples
Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III

Since the invasion of Iraq, the West has given us daily proof that it is neither interested in the common destiny of humanity nor in dialogue between peoples. Its only concern is absolute global dominance – military, financial, cultural and intellectual. Prince Kum’a Ndumbe 111 thinks, the NATO imposed war against Libya is just one more episode in the scramble for Africa.

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The funding of research and alleged scientific dialogue
Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III

It is time for Africa to rearm itself in the face of the various attacks being unleashed against it by Western military powers. A key area is sovereignty over the use of its natural resources and wealth. The struggle, argues Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III, begins with the restoration and reaffirmation of our collective memories.

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Egypt – Time for the peoples revolution to open the Rafah Crossing!
Haidar Eid

Israel has not only colonised the territories, writes Haidar Eid, but it has also taken control of the “Palestinian narrative and history” and confiscated international law. The Rafah crossing, like the birth of the Palestinian state, is testimony to the injustices that continue to be inflicted on the people.

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Tanzania has said should the world experience a second economic downturn, the impact on East African Community (EAC) countries would be more telling as the economies of the five partner states were more interconnected than never before. The Minister for Finance, Mr Mustafa Mkulo told a sideline session of the 2011 IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Washington DC that shocks for Africa, especially the EAC members from a new economic downturn would be worse than in last crisis. He recalled that three years ago Africa was hit hard by the global economic crisis as exports dropped and financial flows declined.

This Connect your Rights! policy issue paper from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) outlines the state of human rights online and the major challenges facing activists and human rights defenders. As levels of censorship and surveillance are increasing worldwide, even in democratic countries, which threatens the work — and the lives — of human rights defenders, APC calls for a focus on human rights.

Four years after the Great Recession, a catastrophe has been avoided, but few real lessons have been drawn and nothing has been fixed, says this report from the International Labour Organisation. 'Indeed, in many cases the crisis is being used as another opportunity to subordinate individual workers, governments and entire societies to the sway of unaccountable global capital markets. After a short revival of corporatist social dialogue in some countries, more workers are being pushed into precarious employment, and austerity packages are making working people, their families and pensioners pay for the crisis.'

In many cities air pollution is reaching levels that threaten people's health, according to an unprecedented compilation of air quality data released by the World Health Organisation. The information includes data from nearly 1,100 cities across 91 countries, including capital cities and cities with more than 100,000 residents. WHO estimates more than two million people die every year from breathing in tiny particles present in indoor and outdoor air pollution. In both developed and developing countries, the largest contributors to urban outdoor air pollution include motor transport, small-scale manufacturers and other industries, burning of biomass and coal for cooking and heating, as well as coal-fired power plants.

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reached an all-time high in 2010, rising 45 per cent in the past 20 years. Rising rapidly between 1990 and 2010, global atmospheric CO2 levels totaled 33 billion metric tons last year, according to a report published by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Global CO2 emissions fell one per cent in 2009, during the Great Recession, but rose at an unprecedented five per cent rate in 2010.

Global production of biofuels increased 17 per cent in 2010 to reach an all-time high of 105 billion liters, up from 90 billion litres in 2009. High oil prices, a global economic rebound, and new laws and mandates in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, and the United States, among other countries, are contributing to the surge in production, according to research conducted by the Worldwatch Institute’s Climate and Energy Program for the website Vital Signs Online.

International justice advocates are worried that donors will deprive the International Criminal Court (ICC) of sufficient funding next year, hindering the court’s ability to fulfil an expanding mandate that will stretch from Kenya to Libya and potentially Ivory Coast. In late July, the court proposed a 2012 budget of 159.45 million dollars, an increase of 13.6 percent over 2011. Even before the proposal was submitted, however, key donors were issuing calls for zero growth in the court’s budget.

South Africa could be paying 'a couple of hundred million US dollars' towards a rescue package for troubled euro zone countries, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said. Gordhan told journalists at a press conference in Pretoria, on his return from the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, that there had been a general recognition that 'we’re all in it together and everyone has to make a contribution to the solution'.

‘For students and practitioners of hands-on development efforts, this handsomely designed and clearly written book merits attention as an illustration of what is possible, indeed what may be better done, outside the foreign aid system and its exhausted orthodoxies,’ writes David Sogge.

The Sierra Club and Bank Information Center are releasing a new report describing the daily realities of coal impacted communities from Cirebon, Indonesia, the Konkan coast and Kutch India, Inner Mongolia China, Appalachia USA, New South Wales Australia, and Limpopo South Africa. These stories paint an illuminating picture of an industry that brings toxic pollution, corruption, intimidation, poverty, and destruction to local societies.

African economies face considerable risks from a renewed global economic downturn, African finance ministers told a Washington news briefing. They added that the continent’s economies are still on the recovery path from the previous global crisis and are in the process of restoring critical economic buffers. The ministers also stressed that Africa was bracing for adverse effects from the economic problems in the euro zone, with export receipts and remittances particularly vulnerable. They noted that, as a new global downturn threatened, African countries were more interconnected than ever before with their neighbors and with their principal markets.