Greenpeace is pleased to announce the appointment of two prominent African activists into senior positions in the organisation, Kumi Naidoo as Executive Director of Greenpeace International, and Michelle Ndiaye Ntab as Executive Director of Greenpeace Africa. Kumi Naidoo from South Africa and former General
Secretary of CIVICUS(1), will take over from Gerd Leipold in November 2009, and Michelle Ndiaye Ntab from Senegal assumed her appointment in April.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has dismissed a bid by Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) ex-militia chief Germain Katanga for his war crimes trial to be thrown out. Judge Bruno Cotte dismissed an argument by Katanga that the case was inadmissible on the basis that legal proceedings had been brought against him before courts in his home country.

Civilians in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) villages are continuing to flee repeat reprisal attacks by the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The attacks have been provoked by ongoing anti-LRA operations by the DRC army in the region, according to locals. "The LRA continues to attack the villages, which they burn and loot, and kidnap civilians," Leandres Bwilu, the administrator of the worst-affected territory of Dungu, in Orientale Province, told IRIN.

The UN refugee agency has condemned the victimization of Somali civilians in Mogadishu after a weekend spike in the fighting in the capital sent thousands more people fleeing the city. This latest exodus pushed the number of displaced from the capital past the 100,000-mark to 117,000 since street battles erupted on May 8.

The encampment of hundreds of thousands of Burundian refugees in Tanzania is coming to an end after more than 20 years. Rather than respecting the safety and dignity of refugees through truly voluntary repatriation or the pursuit of alternative durable solutions, the Tanzanian Government is pressuring refugees to repatriate through intimidation and the denial of basic services in violationof basic international human rights and refugee law.

Despite some impressive gains in rebuilding Sierra Leone seven years after the end of its brutal civil war, the situation in the West African nation remains fragile, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said. “The outbreak of political violence in March of this year was a wake-up call on challenges that require urgent and continued attention,” Mr. Ban told the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission’s high-level meeting on Sierra Leone.

Amnesty International has released its report into the dire conditions and gross human rights abuses endured in Nairobi's informal settlements. The Unseen Majority: Nairobi's Two Million Slum Dwellers describes how half of Nairobi's population live in informal settlements, but are crammed into only 5 per cent of the city’s residential area and just 1 per cent of all land in the city.

"Kenya has a long history of serious human rights violations but it now has an opportunity to turn the page," said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, concluding the mission to Kenya. "Successive Kenyan governments have been good at establishing Commissions and Taskforces and poor at implementing their recommendations. This government must not repeat that pattern."

President Umaru Yar'Adua of Nigeria, halfway through his presidential mandate, has undermined the country's foremost anti-corruption body, done little to rein in an abusive police force, and failed to address the root causes of the escalating crisis in the Niger Delta, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch said in a letter to Yar'Adua that there have been serious setbacks during the first two years in addressing Nigeria's chronic human rights problems and endemic corruption.

The parties in Wiwa v. Shell have agreed to settle human rights claims charging the Royal Dutch/Shell company, its Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC or Shell Nigeria), and the former head of its Nigerian operation, Brian Anderson, with complicity in the torture, killing, and other abuses of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and other non-violent Nigerian activists in the mid-1990s in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta.

The Arab Program for Human Rights Activists follows up with deep concern and complete resentment the security procedures' aftermath that accompanied the visit of U.S. President Barak Obama to Cairo on Thursday 04/06/2009. In this regard, the Program purses the serious breaches of citizens' rights that had been conducted between 4th and 6th of June. In addition to the desistance state that took place in Cairo.

Sexual violence is a brutal reality in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo: Tens of thousands of women and children were raped in the region last year alone. In a guest editorial, François Grignon of the International Crisis Group urges the West to fight the epidemic before more lives are shattered.

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cc In response to a 1 June Human Rights Watch letter calling for the transfer of Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) soldiers to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the umbrella organisation IBUKA expresses concern over the absence of measures to bring Western parties complicit in Rwanda's 1994 tragedy to task. While broadly applauding Human Rights Watch's commitment to justice, IBUKA and its associates AVEGA and AERG take issue with the letter's suggestions that RPF soldiers should be tried in the same manner as genocidaires. Missing from the discussion, IBUKA contends, is the role of Western governments in the genocide, an omission which needs to be swiftly rectified if rich countries are not simply to be immune from international justice.

The fight against gay church leaders is on in Uganda, led by top anti-gay Pastors Martin Sempa, Solomon Male and Michael Kyazze. According to media reports these Pastors say they have received about 150 complaints from alleged sodomy victims who claim to have been abused by a number of church leaders.

In 1994, hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbours, friends, and family members across Rwanda. Nine years later the killers came home from prison to live side by side again with their victims. The complexities of this homecoming are explored in director Anne Aghion’s emotionally powerful film "My Neighbour, My Killer", where, amongst the green hills and tiled roofs of the village of Gafunda, the memories of those horrors resurface as widows shell beans and peel vegetables.

The hunter-gatherer Ogiek tribe of Kenya could become the latest in the world’s growing tide of ‘conservation refugees’ if Kenya’s government acts on its threat to evict them from their land in the name of conservation. The Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga have said that their government plans to remove the Ogiek from their ancestral land in the Mau forest.

The World Health Organisation has called for governments to require all tobacco packets to have pictures showing the dangers of tobacco use. According to the WHO website tobacco is the only legalised product that kills when consumed as the manufacture intended. Tobacco has lead to more than five million preventable deaths every year – making tobacco a far worse killer than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

Some 110,000 Sudanese refugees over the age of 18 in eastern Chad will receive identity cards under a new programme launched with the support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “The ID cards are the equivalent of a ‘refugee passport’ allowing free movement within the host country and providing access to some basic services in line with the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention,” agency spokesperson Ron Redmond told reporters in Geneva.

An independent United Nations expert has called on the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to protect human rights workers and prosecute those who threaten or attack them. Human rights defenders, including lawyers and members of non-governmental organizations, “face illegitimate restrictions of their right to core freedoms, i.e. freedoms of opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association,” said Margaret Sekaggya, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights.