Rather than finding safety from violence and persecution in the country, refugees and asylum seekers face administrative delays, extortion and the constant threat of deportation. In commemoration of World Refugee Day the National Consortium of Refugee Affairs, in collaboration with Lawyers for Human Rights and the Wits Forced Migration Studies Programme, issued a report outlining these hazards and government’s efforts to address them.

Zambia has started the process to revoke the status of an estimated 6,000 Rwandan refugees that fled from the genocide in 1994, the Zambian Ministry of Home Affairs announced. The announcement comes amid threats by the UNHCR to send back 10,000 refugees from the DRC illegally settled on Zambia's northern border with the vast central African state following complaints from the Zambian government.

Refugees in Burundi have called for the killers of 160 people at a camp there two years ago to face justice. The refugees -- Banyamulenge Tutsis -- had fled to Burundi to escape warfare in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.

The international community should do more to assist returning Liberian refugees if peace is to take root there, said Antonio Guterres, top official of the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR, while visiting neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire. But the UN High Commissioner for Refugees warned that peace alone could not guarantee Liberia’s future stability.

“I was four when I was left in the care of my uncle, who was childless. While I was small everything was fine, but when I turned nine my living hell began. I was no longer a child of the house, I was a slave of the house,” said Souleymane. Now 16 and dressed in rags, the sad-looking boy whose right hand is missing three fingers breaks into tears on recalling those years.

The Burundian government is detaining rather than rehabilitating former child soldiers associated with the rebel National Liberation Forces, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper released on the annual Day of the African Child.

In a 15 June 2006 communiqué submitted to the public prosecutor, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information holds the Interior Ministry totally responsible for the life and health condition of blogger and prisoner of opinion Mohammad Al-Sharqawi. HRinfo demands that the public prosecutor require the Interior Ministry to allow Al-Sharqawi to be admitted to hospital, where he could receive necessary medical care for injuries resulting from torture, particularly injuries to his hips and left arm.

More than 10,000 Chadians have fled to Sudan's war-torn Darfur region in the last month, the international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres says. They have been escaping attacks reported to have been carried out by men on horseback and camels.

Burundi's government and the country's last active rebel group have agreed to end hostilities and draft a permanent ceasefire deal in the next two weeks. Observers say a deal with the FNL is seen as one of the final hurdles for stability after the long civil war.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, and the European Union Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, Louis Michel, arrived on Friday 16 June in Bujumbura for a two-day visit. The officials arrived from Tanzania, where they had visited camps hosting Burundian refugees and witnessed the repatriation of some of the refugees.

As winter sets in, the Zimbabwean government has launched another operation to purge the capital, Harare, of "illegal" homes and market stalls in an effort to "clean" the city.

Uganda plans to spend US$10 million to resettle internally displaced persons in northern Uganda, where a 20-year war against the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has forced almost two million people out of their homes.

Disarmament of pro-government militias in western Cote d’Ivoire failed to start as planned on Friday 16 June after some 2,000 fighters, due to hand over their weapons, failed to show up for the special ceremony.

The International Secretariat of OMCT has been informed by the African Association for the Protection of Human Rights (Association africaine de défense des droits de l'homme - ASADHO), members of the SOS torture network, of the arbitrary arrest and detention of Mr. Mukadi Bonyi, lawyer at the Supreme Court of Justice and member of the Council of the Union for the reconstruction of Congo (Conseil de l'Union pour la reconstruction du Congo - UREC), a political party.

East African states have agreed to isolate leaders of armed factions in Somalia by imposing a regional travel ban on them and freezing their assets in a bid to help the nation's fledgling transitional federal government restore stability. Kenya took the lead last week, imposing sanctions against Somalia's so-called "warlords" after they and their militia were driven out of Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, by forces loyal to the city's Islamic courts.

Africa’s prospects for attaining peace risk being undermined unless action is taken to reel in the horrific violence inflicted on the continent’s children, according to the UN children’s agency, UNICEF. Friday 16th June is the Day of the African Child. It marks the 1976 shooting of school children protesting apartheid in the South African township of Soweto. Three decades on, that anniversary is being used to draw attention to the continued violence suffered by children in Africa.

There is a need for greater consciousness within UN peacekeeping operations of the potential economic impact of deployment and missions need to be adapted to the war-torn economies where UN peacekeeping missions are deployed, says a new report.

Over the last two days, high level police, civil society and government delegates have met in Arusha, Tanzania, to look at the state of policing in East Africa, and map out a plan for reform in the region. Ms Maja Daruwala, Director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, which facilitated the conference with the East Africa Law Society, said that, “The roundtable has shown the huge amount of interest that the question of police reform in East Africa generates. For decades, the communities of East Africa have been subject to unreformed, undemocratic and unaccountable policing. For the people in those communities, that has meant violence, corruption and brutality.”

Muslims have protested outside Scotland Yard against the tactics used by police in an anti-terror raid in east London. Islamic Human Rights Commission chairman Massoud Shajareh told BBC News: "The papers were talking about [how] they became very Islamic in the last few years, as if that is automatically connected to terrorist activity."

Stilbaai deputy mayor Lorna Scott, victim of a string of racist attacks, says she is planning to take "legal action" over the harassment. Speaking at a media briefing in Cape Town with members of the African National Congress' Western Cape executive, she said this could include a defamation action against provincial Democratic Alliance leader Theuns Botha for what she said where "attacks on my character".