Forced Migration Review (FMR) is a magazine published three times a year in English, Arabic, Spanish and French by the Refugee Studies Centre of the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. FMR is in print and online.

The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians. The operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, rebuffing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.

In this course, participants will increase their understanding of the psychosocial and mental health issues of refugees and learn how to implement effective interventions. Topics will include: Review of international research about the psychosocial and mental health consequences of war and violence; Implications for working with various cultures and contexts; Skills for assessment of need; Culturally sensitive interviewing skills; Methods for working with translators; Introduction to individual, family, group and community interventions, and more.

The course will cover various advanced topics in international refugee law. Topics to be covered include ethical and professional obligations while representing clients undergoing refugee status determination; the \"nexus\" requirement of the refugee definition; the expanded grounds for protection under the OAU Convention and UNHCR\'s mandate; the possibility of socio-economic \"persecution\"; the distinction between prosecution and \"persecution\"; the non-refoulement and expulsion provisions of the Convention; refugee rights guaranteed by the Convention; and, the interaction between the Convention and domestic and international human rights protections.

Young women are not only combatants in contemporary African wars, they also participate in a whole array of different roles. By and large, though they remain invisible in these contexts to northern policy makers and NGOs. This policy dialogue argues that to improve policy and programming efforts it is necessary to broaden the understanding of young women’s roles and participation in armed conflict in Africa historically and today. The intention is to provide policy makers and aid practitioners with a state-of-the-art overview of the situation for young women in African war and post-war situations.

Freak weather conditions continue to cause devastation in Morocco as authorities struggle to address the humanitarian crisis. A number of people have lost their lives, mainly in the countryside and in mountainous regions and areas near rivers and dams.

The leader of an armed group involved in recent combat in the South Darfur region of Sudan has pulled his militia out of the conflict zone as a result of the decision made by the hybrid African Union (AU) and United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) to stay and protect civilians in the area. There have been renewed clashes since last month in Muhajeria involving the Government of Sudan and the rebel groups known as the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army/Mini Minawi (SLA/MM).

The Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) says that it has repatriated 335 former Rwandan Hutu fighters and their dependents to Rwanda in the past month alone. During the same period, the Mission has also transferred 120 Rwandan civilians to the United Nations refugee agency for further consideration as potential refugees in the Congo. As of 5the February, another 219 Rwandan nationals are awaiting repatriation at United Nations-run facilities in north-eastern Congo.

A growing tide of Somalis fleeing conflict at home has led to overcrowding in refugee camps in neighbouring Kenya and the United Nations does not expect the influx to ease soon, a U.N. official said. The Dadaab refugee camp in arid northern Kenya received 62,000 new arrivals from Somalia in 2008 compared with only 18,000 in the previous year, U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said.

The United Nations Human Rights Council should ask Senegal to move forward on the trial of the exiled former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, five African and international human rights groups have said. On February 6, 2009, the council will examine Senegal’s human rights record as part of its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) procedure.

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo should urgently carry out new recommendations from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to protect children from violence and abuse, Human Rights Watch and the Coalition of Congolese Non-governmental Organizations on Child Rights (CODE) has said.

African leaders on Wednesday supported a plan to delay the execution of an arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir, but asked him to take steps to end rights violations in Darfur. The African leaders went beyond words and asked the Sudanese leader to accept a team of lawyers from the African Union (AU) and the Arab League to help bring perpetrators of the violence in Darfur and help carry out investigations there.

This latest policy briefing from the International Crisis Group, argues that the West African country’s new prime minister, Carlos Gomes Junior, has an opportunity to carry out the administrative and political measures needed to strengthen the state, stabilise the economy and fight drug trafficking. But he will need to base his approach on political dialogue with President Nino Vieira, the army and rivals within his own party.

Recent attacks by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have driven thousands of Congolese to South Sudan. A UNHCR team last weekend visited the Sudanese village of Lasu, 50 kilometres from the DRC border, and registered 680 uprooted Congolese, most of them from the village of Aba. They said they fled their homes last week following an attack by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group from Uganda.

Tensions have returned to northern Mali in recent days, despite efforts by Algeria to mediate a peaceful settlement between the government and Tuareg rebels. The Malian army has intensified its attacks against rebel positions in the area of Kidal, possibly in pursuit of a commander who rejects the peace plan proposed in the 2006 Algiers Accord.

Debate is heating up in Algeria between clerics and human rights activists over a proposed ban on capital punishment in the country. Religious leaders accuse legislators of denying society a punitive measure prescribed in the Qur'an, while supporters of the ban believe the death penalty is a human rights issue and should not be approached from a religious or philosophical perspective.

Legal history was made today in The Hague, the Netherlands, when the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was mandated to try war crimes beginning in 2002, put its first suspect taken into custody, a Congolese warlord accused of recruiting child soldiers, on trial. The case of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo represents not only the debut proceedings of the ICC but also the first trial in the history of international law to see the active participation of victims in the proceedings, among which will number child combatants.

A second group of Sudanese refugees, most of whom are fleeing strife-torn Darfur, have been evacuated from perilous circumstances in Iraq to a groundbreaking transit centre in Romania, from which they hope to be resettled in the United States, the United Nations refugee agency reported. The group of 42 Sudanese refugees are staying in the new Emergency Transit Centre set up by the Romanian Government, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to provide a temporary haven for refugees pending final resettlement in a third country, a UNHCR spokesperson said.

One year after the battle between government and armed opposition forces in N'Djaména, Chad, serious human rights violations perpetrated by the security forces are continuing with no one being held accountable. "A year after the conflict, members of the security forces who carried out a regime of murder, torture and enforced disappearance of suspected government opponents have not been brought to justice, fuelling an already pervasive problem of impunity," said Tawanda Hondora, Amnesty International's Africa Deputy Programme Director.

Is the International Criminal Court (ICC) pursuing too aggressive and disruptive an agenda in Africa, without proper priorities? This series of papers, published by the Royal African Society, suggests that the ICC has made a promising beginning in many respects, but that its work in Africa highlights some significant weakness. According to one charge, the ICC’s pursuit of justice jeopardises fragile peace deals, risking the prolongation of conflict.