A four-member UNHCR emergency team has been assessing the needs of thousands of displaced people in the Galkayo region of northern Somalia. The team is expected to pave the way for a permanent international presence in the region for the first time since the 1990s.

Refugees face many challenges living in camps, but these difficulties vary amongst different groups. Young Liberian refugees in the Buduburam camp in Ghana deal with their problems in specific ways. Studying the social resilience of these groups may help generate strategies for their improvement.

The US military has launched air raids against fighters in Somalia, saying they are suspected members of al-Qaeda. Abdirahman Dinari, a Somalia government spokesman, confirmed the offensive on Tuesday (9 January 2007).

The over 7,000 refugees barred from entering Kenya on the Somali side of the border near Liboi are a perfect picture of a humanitarian disaster in the making. The Standard and KTN team at Liboi traced groups of deported refugees who have been holding out at the shared border stretch commonly known as no-man’s land, hoping that they would be taken in.

Deciding whether or not to return home 20 years after you've left isn't easy. But this is the dilemma facing 70,000 southern Sudanese refugees who have lived in Ethiopia for two decades. Many have never seen their homeland: they were born and raised in refugee camps.

To support the sustainable reintegration of returnees, UNHCR has since the 1990s been rebuilding infrastructure and helping returnees – mostly women – find sources of income. The UN refugee agency helped build a school, police station and water well as more and more people started returning here.

This research examined the management of IDP’s in Nigeria based on the February/May 2000 communal conflict at Kaduna, Northern Nigeria, as an example and a focus for the study. The research took place against a background of few empirical studies of IDPs in Nigeria specifically within the purview of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.

Refugees and asylum seekers get a bad press in some sections of the UK media, but one advocacy group is using drama to counter the negative public perceptions. The Actors for Refugees production of The Asylum Monologues has played to more than 2,000 people around England and Wales since opening in London on June 25, 2006 as part of celebrations in the UK marking World Refugee Day.

The Somali community in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, has warned of more deaths as increasing numbers of Somali migrants make the perilous journey to Yemen to escape the civil war. The warning followed reports that 140 migrants, mostly Somalis, were missing and 17 had died after their vessels capsized off the Yemeni coast last month.

Thirteen people have been killed in two ambushes in southern Sudan by suspected fighters of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group currently engaged in peace talks with the government, military officials said on Thursday (4 January 2007).

With tensions rising between Niger and Burkina Faso as they accuse each other's security forces of crossing the border to rob and harass villagers, local officials in the area met recently to renew a call for a buffer zone. "The situation is very difficult as the exact location of the border has not been agreed on," the governor of the Sahel Region of Burkina Faso, Bila Dipama, told IRIN on Thursday (4 January 2007), a week after the meeting in Burkina Faso's eastern town of Fada.

It has been two years since a landmark peace agreement to end Sudan's 21-year-old civil war between the north and the south, but aid agencies cautioned the international community to ensure the peace process does not stall.

Government and Ethiopian forces have captured what they say was a jungle base used by Islamic courts fighters in southern Somalia. A government military commander said on Monday (8 January 2007) that Ras Kamboni was taken after a two-day campaign using ground forces and air support.

The trial of a Rwandan official accused of being one of the main instigators of the 1994 genocide has begun at the UN war crimes tribunal in Tanzania. Tharcisse Renzaho, the former governor of the capital, Kigali, has been charged with genocide, complicity to commit genocide, assassination, and rape.

An Amnesty International statement claims that the Egyptian authorities were preparing to forcibly return four Tunisian nationals – Ayman Hkiri, Ahamed Lahbib, Mhamed Almadiri and another whose name was unknown. If returned to Tunisia they would be in grave danger of torture, Amnesty added.

Though the seat of the African Commission on Human and People's Rights, The Gambia has over the years been known for its dwindling human rights records, in particular torture by security forces. But the purported torturers will soon be challenged at the international legal courts, a clandestine activist group reveals.

Chadian and Sudanese militias and other armed groups are committing serious human rights abuses against civilians in eastern Chad, and the Chadian government must do more to protect civilians from such abuses, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today (9 January 2007).

More that 50 prison officers, on strike for one week, have been detained by the Cameroonian army and taken to an unknown location, according to human rights groups. Reports indicate that the striking warders have not been given anything to eat or drink and that several have been tortured.

The police in Zimbabwe have announced that they have arrested at least 19,239 people for their involvement in illegal mining and smuggling of precious minerals from the country. Hazardous artisanal mining has become one of the last possible revenue sources for Zimbabwe's many unemployed.

Thousands of people have fled the village of Fataki, 70 km northeast of Bunia, capital of Ituri district in Eastern DRC, following clashes between militia and the regular army, officials of the United Nations peacekeeping mission, MONUC, said.