Some lie awkwardly splayed on the stairs while others sleep in a neat row outside a church in Johannesburg from where Zimbabwean refugees will soon find themselves having to relocate again. The Methodist Church, in the city centre, has long been a popular destination for thousands of Zimbabweans fleeing their country's political and economic woes and more recently a devastating cholera crisis.

Angolan refugees in Zambia’s Western Province have resisted voluntary repatriation despite their country's political stability and the on-going national economic reconstruction, the UN refugees agency report has revealed. According to the voluntary repatriation intention survey conducted by United Nations High Commission for Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Zambian government at Mayukwayukwa Refugee Settlement, results showed that only 251 had expressed interest to repatriate out of the 10,000 in the camps.

Vice president George Kunda on Friday charged in parliament that the government was aware of some people who had married to hide their homosexual activities. Answering a question from Chadiza MMD member of parliament Allan Mbewe during the vice president’s question and answer session, on what government was doing to curb homosexuality in the country, vice-president Kunda said the laws available were stiff enough to punish such people.

More than 100 CAR refugees crossed the volatile border to south-eastern Chad over the weekend, joining over 6,800 others who began arriving earlier this year in two sites near the remote Daha village registered by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Another 2,500 new arrivals are sheltering just across the border in the Chadian village of Massambaye, 125 kilometres east of Daha.

More than 180,000 ex-fighters in Sudan’s decades-long north-south civil war will be assisted to return to civilian life as their ongoing demobilization enters a new phase, the United Nations mission in the country (UNMIS) has announced. The mission said in a press release that reintegration is the last and most crucial phase of the multi-million dollar scheme for the process known as disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) called for by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which in 2005 ended the 22-year conflict.

Major floods in late 2008 and 2009 have plunged southern Africa into a growing humanitarian crisis, killing dozens and displacing thousands. The Zambezi River Basin is affected annually by floods, bringing death and disease to those living along the banks. The fourth largest river in Africa, has its source in Zambia and flows through Angola, back into Zambia, and along the borders of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe to Mozambique, where it empties into the Indian Ocean.

Hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees will face a humanitarian emergency this year, unless urgent steps are taken to deal with a serious public health crisis unfolding in the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya, international agency Oxfam has warned in a new report.

The Kenyan government should urgently renew efforts to revise and enact bills to create a special tribunal to try those responsible for last year's election violence, Human Rights Watch said today. The organization also issued a memo explaining the procedures of the International Criminal Court in relation to the special tribunal.

Somali Interior Minister Abdulkadir Ali Omar has been wounded in a deadly bomb attack in the capital Mogadishu. The BBC's Mohammed Olad Hassan in the city says the minister's secretary was killed and a bodyguard also injured. The minister was passing through the capital's bustling Bakara market - a stronghold of the radical al-Shabab militia - when a landmine went off.

Zimbabwe's new inclusive government should carry out comprehensive justice reforms without delay to ensure accountability for past abuses, the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Thursday. The New York-based organisation noted that as the first year anniversary for Zimbabwe’s controversial elections approached on March 29, the country’s neighbours should take the opportunity to press the unity government to demonstrate its commitment to human rights reforms before releasing development aid.

Rwanda and DRC have set in motion high-level negotiations over the return of warlord Gen Laurent Nkunda after a deal on Monday in which the government ceded too much ground to the Gen Nkunda’s former fighters. Rwanda Foreign Affairs Minister, Rosemary Museminali, was set to meet with her DRC counterpart Alexis Tambwe Mwamba on Thursday, with teams representing security, diplomacy and justice to discuss bilateral cooperation on a number of fronts, including Gen Nkunda’s fate.

Thousands of people from across the UK will march through central London tomorrow (Saturday 28 March) ahead of the G20 summit to demand decent jobs and public services for all, an end to global poverty and inequality, and a green economy. At a rally in Hyde Park, they will hear calls for a co-ordinated fiscal stimulus to create and preserve jobs, international action to ensure that an out of control finance sector never threatens the stability of the global economy again and a commitment from world leaders that they will move to a low carbon economy.

On April 27, 2009 the Ogoni people of Nigeria will finally have their chance at justice when the families of famed activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues, who were sentenced to death in a sham trial in Nigeria and hanged in 1995, will show that Royal Dutch Shell was at the very least complicit in their deaths and likely colluded with the Nigerian military to quell peaceful protests through murder, torture and destruction of villages. The plaintiffs’ attorneys will use a U.S. law on the books since 1789 called the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) that allows violations of international law to be tried in U.S. courts.

Last week, a Sudanese refugee girl was sexually harassed in the street, while waiting for a taxi in the Al Haram district. A taxi driver pulled up and verbally and physically harassed her. When she accused him of verbally and physically harassing her, he drove his car towards and hit her with the car repeatedly. She attempted to desperately defend herself, but did not have time to do so. The taxi driver then grabbed her arm and hand and began moving the taxi.

The Conflict, Security and Development Group (CSDG) at King’s College London together with the Africa Leadership Centre (ALC), in collaboration with the Commission of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), is pleased to announce a call for applications for the MA Studentships and Mentoring Programme 2009-2010.

This week a group of South African non-governmental organisations filed papers in the Pretoria High Court to prevent President Kgalema Motlanthe from granting pardons to prisoners serving sentences for apartheid-era political crimes. These individuals were all found guilty and sentenced by a court of law, and did not apply for amnesty before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Now the government wants to give those who thumbed their noses at the TRC, or failed to qualify for amnesty, a second chance in what is presented as an attempt to deal with the TRC's unfinished business.

Arbitrary kidnappings and beatings of citizens in The Gambia, allegedly involving President Yaya Jammeh’s forces, signal a deterioration of human rights, says Amnesty International. Up to 1,000 people have been kidnapped by ‘witch doctors’ – from Guinea, rights activists say – since early February and taken to detention centres or to the President’s farm in Kanilai, accompanied by the President’s personal protection guards, the police and the army, according to an Amnesty International communiqué released on 18 March.

The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), a major rebel group in Darfur, has cancelled plans to hold more peace talks until the Sudanese government lets back aid groups it expelled from the troubled region. The announcement marks the latest escalation in the Darfur crisis since the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir this month over alleged war crimes in the region. Sudan, which does not recognise the ICC, rejects the charge.

For three days and nights 28-year-old Comfort Wilson rode in the back of a pickup truck from her rural village in Liberia to the capital, Monrovia. She came with 30 women from her village sleeping in the truck bed, eating food they prepared at home. They came, along with women from Mozambique, Guatemala, Kosovo and 25 other countries, as a global show of support for the idea that more women must be involved in building and maintaining peace.

Pressure to provide new housing in South Kivu is mounting as more and more people return to the relatively peaceful and stable province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). But the ability of agency's such as UNHCR to keep pace with demand will depend on the continuing generosity of donors. "The absence of adequate housing is one of the biggest challenges refugees face upon their return to South Kivu. After years of absence, most find their homes destroyed and have nowhere to stay," Sebastien Apatita, head of the UN refugee agency's office in Baraka, explained during a recent visit.