There is only one human race. Our struggle and every real struggle is to put the human being at the centre of society, starting with the worst off. An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person where ever they may find themselves. If you live in a settlement you are from that settlement and you are a neighbour and a comrade in that settlement.

The Social Movements Indaba is mobilising social movements, immigrant communities, NGOs, unions, concerned residents from poor areas around the province for a march this Saturday, 24th May. The march will gather at Marks Park (Empire and Hospital Road) from 9am, proceed through Hillbrow and stop at the Departments of Home Affairs and Housing before ending at the Library Gardens. The message marchers will be conveying is that our struggle is common and knows no borders. Everyone who wants to make their voices heard should join us-our struggle knows no borders.

Managing and Transforming Global Conflicts in the 21st Century is a two-day experts level seminar arranged for government and political leadership, diplomats, representatives of national and international organizations, and experienced practitioners, mediators and field workers for the UN and other international agencies.

Johannesburg townships Alexandra and Diepsloot were tense on Thursday morning in the wake of xenophobic violence that has killed a number of people since the weekend, police said. Captain Louise Reed said one man was injured in a suspected mob attack in Diepsloot on Wednesday evening.

The government of Sudan has announced suspension of dialogue with the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), a Darfur rebel group accused of unleashing fatal attacks on Omdurman at the weekend. Sudanese officials said the international community is already informed about the decision, and is at the brink of consulting it regarding negotiations with other Darfur armed groups.

The declining humanitarian assistance in the Sahrawi refugee's camp in Algeria leaves children with severe malnutrition. According to a Norwegian Church Aid report to be published next week, one out of five children who have grown up in refuges camp in Algeria are suffering from acute malnutrition

More than 300 Kenyan refugees have returned home from Uganda weeks after fleeing their homeland in the wake of the inter-ethnic violence that followed last year's presidential election in Kenya.

Two agreements signed since the end of 2007 offer some hope for an end to more than a decade of violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), even if fighting has continued and a lasting solution has yet to be found to the presence in the region of Rwandan Hutu rebels, according to analysts. Since the DRC government and various armed groups in the chronically unstable North Kivu province signed a ceasefire in January, the truce has been repeatedly violated and the number of displaced civilians in the province has increased.

Mount Elgon residents have begun disclosing the atrocities meted on them by a criminal gang that has been terrorising them before the joint military and police ´Operation Okoa Maisha´ was launched early this year. The Saboti land Defence Force militia employed methods of torture reminiscent of West Africa in the 90s, including chopping off their victims´ ears on flimsy accusations like drunkenness, cutting down maize stalks, refusing to join the SLDF or paying membership fee.

One by one, they come. They talk about the incessant beatings, the water that was poured over their nose and throat until they couldn’t breathe and the bricks that were tied to their testicles. One says a soldier cocked a gun in his mouth and said “Now you’re dead.” Another recounts how a bagful of chopped, fresh red pepper was pulled over his head, how his eyes and skin felt like they were on fire and he couldn’t breathe. A young man says dead bodies were dropped off in his room, and he was ordered to clean off the blood. Right, demonstration of torture in Karamoja.

An inter-departmental task team is being urgently set up to investigate the causes underlying the recent attacks on foreign nationals in Alexandra township and elsewhere, Government Spokesman Themba Maseko said Thursday. He was briefing reporters on the outcome of the latest cabinet meeting, held on Wednesday.

We, South Africans who faced the might of unjust and brutal apartheid machinery in South Africa and fought against it with all our strength, with the objective to live in a just, democratic society, refuse todaynto celebrate the existence of an Apartheid state in the Middle East. While Israel and its apologists around the world will, with pomp and ceremony, loudly proclaim the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel this month, we who have lived with and struggled against oppression and colonialism will, instead, remember 6 decades of
catastrophe for the Palestinian people.

The latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the local conflict’s root causes, including unequal access to land and unfair sharing of revenues from exploitation of natural resource. It analyses in detail a district that has too often been ignored by Kinshasa and which now needs a strategy involving national and provincial institutions, with the active support of the UN Mission in Congo (MONUC) and donors.

Mass arrests in Khartoum of perceived supporters of a Darfur rebel group and other political opponents raise fears of mistreatment, Human Rights Watch has said. The arrests by Sudanese security forces of more than 100 people followed an attack on Sudan’s capital by the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on May 10, 2008 that left dozens of civilians dead or severely injured.

There is a country in Africa which, in a few years, has achieved more peace than most formerly war-ravaged countries around the world - much more than Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, or Afghanistan. There was a comprehensive ceasefire and a power-sharing among former fighters, tens of thousands of whom have been disarmed and re-socialized. Thanks to peaceful, free and fair elections and a new constitution, it has a democratic government for the first time in its history, and it has leadership and one with many women. Its human rights record has improved markedly.

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint programme of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), requests your urgent intervention regarding the following situation in Egypt.

The National Internally Displaced Persons Network of Kenya is deeply concerned with recent moves by the Government of Kenya to forcibly close IDP camps across the country in violation of the international Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and basic human decency. Operation "Rudi Nyumbani" seems to be based on no policy or legal framework but instead uses the force of the provincial administration to prematurely close the IDP camps.

Ethnic groups in northern Ghana clashed on 5 May in the town of Bawku, northern Ghana, leaving at least five people dead. Police have arrested some 72 people and imposed an “indefinite” 22 hour curfew.

Citing "lack of evidence," Moroccan authorities closed an investigation into police abuse allegations made by two human rights defenders whose testimony the prosecutor refused to solicit, Human Rights Watch has said. The two Sahrawi human rights advocates, Dahha Rahmouni and Brahim al-Ansari, say that, in December 2007, police in the city of El-Ayoun, in the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, arbitrarily arrested and beat them before releasing them without charge.

Burundi's army said on Thursday it had killed 50 fighters from the country's last active rebel group in renewed clashes outside the capital Bujumbura. The attack came barely a day after leaders of the Forces for National Liberation (FNL), an ethnic Hutu guerrilla group, said they would drop an amnesty demand and return to the tiny coffee-growing country to implement a long awaited peace deal.