A senior commander of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army rebels has surrendered in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Charles Arop, believed to be behind a brutal attack last Christmas, handed himself in to the Ugandan military.

The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor says he will request ICC judges to open an investigation into Kenya's post-election violence. Luis Moreno-Ocampo made the comments after meeting Kenya's president and prime minister, who said they would co-operate with the ICC probe.

The convictions of Pierre Falcone, Arcadi Gaydamak, ex-president's son Jean-Christophe Mitterrand and Charles Pasqua in a French court for arms trafficking to Angola have exposed the impunity with which arms traffickers supplied weapons to Angola during its 27-year civil war.

Highlighting the plight of Rwandan refugees in Uganda following a UNHCR announcement that they will lose their refugee status by 2011, Lawrence Carter writes in Pambazuka News that the ‘pervasive practice of coercion and forced return of refugees within the East African Community requires urgent attention’. Rwanda may be ‘stable’, argues Carter, but this ‘does not detract from the fact that many Rwandan refugees possess legitimate concerns over their safety and ability to live a peaceful and dignified life if they were to return’.

Armed villagers have killed at least 47 policemen who were trying to intervene in ethnic clashes in the northern Democratic Republic of Congo, reports say. A number of civilians were also killed in the violence which erupted in the village of Dongo in Equateur province early on Thursday, the UN-sponsored Radio Okapi said, citing local officials.

The last 400 of more than 200,000 Burundians who fled to Tanzania 37 years ago travelled home on Friday, ending one of the longest-running refugee sagas in the world, the U.N. refugee agency said on Friday. The Burundians arrived in 1972, fleeing ethnic conflict at home. While many have returned under a U.N.-backed voluntary repatriation programme, some 29,000 were naturalised in Tanzania and 133,000 citizenship applications are still pending there.

A new report on Eritrea has been commissioned by the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights. Contributions were also made by other NGOs, including Human Rights House Foundation. “The HR violations are extensive and systematic, and the oppression by the authorities is total”, says the president of the Oslo Center, Kjell Magne Bondevik.

The total number of people forced from their homes in the past six months by persistent violent conflict in Central and Eastern Africa has topped 1 million, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has reported. According to the data compiled by OCHA’s regional office, the total number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) across the region has now passed the 10 million mark.

Flash floods caused by four days of torrential rains have displaced more than 15,000 people in the southwestern town of El-Waq near the Kenyan border and submerged most homes and businesses, say locals.

An in-depth investigation into the September 28, 2009 killings and rapes at a peaceful rally in Conakry, Guinea, has uncovered new evidence that the massacre and widespread sexual violence were organized and were committed largely by the elite Presidential Guard, commonly known as the “red berets,” Human Rights Watch has said.

A Rwandan man convicted of war crimes has been jailed for life by a Canadian court, without the prospect of parole for 25 years. Desire Munyaneza, 42, was found guilty in May in the first court case brought under Canada's 2000 War Crimes Act.

An estimated 60,000 hungry refugees in the western Uganda settlement of Nakivale have staged a strike complaining of lack of food supplies for three months leading to deaths of mainly children.

Some 14,955 Mauritanian refugees, consisting of 3,888 families, have been repatriated from Senegal to Mauritania since the end of January 2008, under a tripartite agreement signed in November 2007 by both countries and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

With the growing use of satellite imagery and easy-to-use technology, geographical maps are being used more often by human rights organizations. Geo-mapping can help an organization map crises, places of heritage, visualize data, monitor the impact of conflict, uncover critical evidence, and more! The goal of this dialogue will be to take the stories shared by practitioners with experience using these tools and tactics and draw out lessons to enable other organizations to strategically apply these resources.

Citizenship Law in Africa: A comparative study, published by two programs of the Open Society Institute (AfriMAP and the Open Society Justice Initiative), describes the often arbitrary, discriminatory, and contradictory citizenship laws that exist from state to state and recommends ways that African countries can bring their citizenship laws in line with international rights norms.

Somalia's hardline al Shabaab insurgents said they would strike the capitals of Burundi and Uganda in revenge for rocket attacks by peacekeepers from those countries that killed at least 30 people in Mogadishu. "We shall make their people cry," Sheikh Ali Mohamed Hussein, al Shabaab's self-styled governor of Banadir region, which includes Mogadishu, told reporters late on Thursday.

It has been confirmed that the Ogiek tribe will be evicted from their ancestral land in Kenya’s Mau Forest before the end of the year. The Kenyan government’s ‘Mau Forest Interim Co-ordination Secretariat’ has announced that the Mau Forest will be cleared of all people in five phases.

Video footage collected from YouTube leaves little doubt that the riots in Kampala last month were met with excessive use of force by the Ugandan police and military forces. An unestablished number of demonstrators and ordinary civilians, most likely in excess of 20, were killed, and many more injured by stray bullets and through heavy baton beatings.

At least a dozen people have been murdered in Guinea over the past month in what police suspect is a flare up in revenge attacks for last month's bloody government crackdown on protesters. The attacks come amid increasing international condemnation of Captain Moussa Dadis Camara's ruling military junta after gunmen opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in a stadium on Sept 28.

The international community is failing over 1.5 million internally displaced persons in Somalia at a time when the humanitarian crisis is deepening, Walter Kaelin, the Representative of the UN Secretary General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, said at the end of his mission to Somalia in Nairobi, Kenya.