Ugandan government negotiators at peace talks in Sudan have refused to sign a ceasefire agreement with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels. The government delegation left the talks early on Tuesday (17 July), saying the rest of the agenda must be dealt with first.

A plan to create rapid reaction teams of border guards to deal with a European Union immigration crises has been unveiled by the European Commission. The teams would be assembled by the EU border security agency, Frontex, from lists of experts in member states.

The Non-Governmental Organization, Femmes Africa Solidarité (F.A.S), and the regional branch of the University of Peace (Upeace) in Costa Rica, are organizing an intensive short-course on Gender, Peace and Development, from 16 to 22 July 2006, at Laguna Beach in Mbodiène, in the department of Mbour in Senegal. The opening ceremony will be presided over by the Minister of Education, Sunday 16 July at 4pm, and will be attended by a number of important academics and researchers in the field of gender and peace.

There is no chance of peace in Darfur unless the region's dire water shortages are tackled as part of a settlement between rebels and the Sudanese government, a top international economist said.

An African under-14s football team has been banned from taking part in an international tournament in Scotland on the orders of the Foreign Office, which claimed the young players might abscond. The 24-strong squad of players from Bulawayo in Zimbabwe had been due to take part in the Aberdeen International Football Festival, which opened in the city yesterday (17 July). But the squad has been refused access to the UK amid fears that they posed a flight risk.

"The Arab NGO Network for Development calls upon the international community to immediately intervene in order to protect civilians and to end Israeli aggression against Lebanon. ANND joins the call of the Lebanese prime minister to an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire under the support of a strong UN Peacekeeping Mission supervision."

Using the events of recent decades in the Sudan, this paper argues that localised as well as regional mass population displacement has caused enormous cultural and political transformation that is often overlooked in scholarship about the Sudan. This reality of bringing intact rural communities to the heart of urban Sudan with increased numbers of community-based organisations, has contributed to displacing the state’s (modernist) development discourse and giving muscles and blood to the “religious” - or the “religiously-cloaked ethnic discourse” - on which the state, since 1983, started to lean as means of acquiring legitimacy.

Coalition For Peace in Africa (COPA), an organization specializing in capacity building of practitioners in conflict transformation and peace building will from 25th September to 27th October 2006 conduct a five week Advanced Training in Conflict Transformation. The training will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa at the Elijah Barayi Memorial Training Institute.

Beatings, electric shocks and the forced ingestion of dirty water, urine and or chemicals are just some of the methods that continue to be used by Algeria's security forces with systematic impunity, Amnesty International revealed in a report published today, (July 13).

Amina Atiku, the wife of Nigeria's vice president, led a continental conference in Abuja, Nigeria to discuss trafficking of women and children. The child trafficking problem in West and Central Africa is believed to be caused by the vulnerability of parents and children, as well as the lack of consequences, and UNICEF officials say the problem is growing.

Climate change could have a devastating impact on Africa, wiping out all the benefits from the measures to help the continent agreed by the world's richest nations last year. The warning will be issued by the British Government today (July 13) when it announces plans to bring poor countries into the next round of international discussions to combat global warming.

The Open Society Justice Initiative today (13 July) denounced a police crackdown on a meeting of human rights activists in Abuja and the threatened arrest of meeting organizers. The meeting, termed a "People's Tribunal," was organized by Nigerian human rights NGOs to protest the recent removal of Bukhari Bello as head of Nigeria's National Human Rights Commission (NHRC)—a move interpreted by the NGOs as a direct assault on the independence of that body.

This review explores the intersection between youth and violent conflict, with a view to enhancing policy and offering programming guidance. The review identifies key issues related to youth and violent conflict, explores how the issue of youth and violent conflict is currently address in key policy frameworks, and offers an overview of current programmes put in place by UNDP and other key international actors.

This report describes human rights abuses against civilians by state security forces, militia forces and by the New Forces during the period of November 2005 to March 2006, and serves to illustrate the human cost of the failure to address impunity and lawlessness in Cote d'Ivoire.

This collection of articles looks at the role of natural resources in Western Sahara and outlines the framework for Western Sahara's independence from Morocco. There is no doubt that the question of the natural resources of Western Sahara such as fish, oil and phosphates has been the main reason for the interest in the area in question. As in so many places all over the globe the exploitation of natural resources including the job opportunities it creates for the occupiers makes states and people react selfishly and in conflict with international law.

As delegates from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society and the private sector gathered at United Nations Headquarters in New York on international migration and development, Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown hailed their input as crucial to the intergovernmental approach to the issue. “The role of civil society is to warn us, and to make sure that we don’t overlook, the real risks of international migration, particularly in the area of human rights,” he told participants.

With no police force of its own, the International Criminal Court (ICC) relies on local law enforcement agencies to protect individuals involved in the court's investigations in Uganda, Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The ICC has set up the Victims and Witnesses Unit, a team of trauma experts, to foster an environment of security and some degree of anonymity for those who voluntarily participate in investigations.

Sudan's refusal to disarm the Janjaweed militias leaves many of the 2.5 million displaced Darfurians strongly opposed to their own peace process. While they greatly desire an end to the violence and the chance to return home, the refugees remain fearful of provisions in the Abuja agreement that would leave them vulnerable to Janjaweed attacks.

This support pack was developed to address low levels of knowledge, skills and resources available to undertake small arms and light weapons (SALW) awareness. The package includes an operational handbook with a set of logically structured guidelines for those conducting SALW awareness programmes, illustrated with examples from the field.

Leandro Despouy, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights' Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, on Friday expressed "serious concern" over a recently passed Egyptian judicial reforms bill. Despouy urged Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak not to sign the law, but instead to send the bill back to parliament for "re-discussion ... with the full participation of the Judges' Club and experts in constitutional law, in order to allow the Parliament to adopt a considerably improved version of the law which guarantees the proper functioning of an independent judiciary."