Sudan's army has committed the first serious violation of a final ceasefire signed a year ago to end Africa's longest civil war in its south, a UN peacekeeping official said on Wednesday. The former southern rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) said the army sent around 1,200 troops last week into the rebel-controlled eastern area of Hamesh Koreb and has threatened to expel the SPLM. A joint UN-led team is still in the area to defuse tensions between the two sides.

Ivory Coast's president urged his supporters on Wednesday to end a wave of attacks on UN peacekeepers in which at least four people were killed, after a lightning peace mission by Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo. Obasanjo, who is also chairman of the African Union, flew in to meet Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, whose supporters have staged three days of anti-UN riots to protest at what they call foreign meddling in the war-divided West African state.

From its peak of 5,000 refugee returns from Tanzania to Burundi in August, the number had dropped to less than 500 a month by the end of December. According to UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, this is explained by cyclical factors as refugees are less willing to return home during the rainy season and wish to leave after they have harvested their crops to ensure they have enough food to last them until the next season.

Newly sworn-in Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has backed efforts to get tens of thousands of people driven into exile by years of civil war to come home, the UN refugee agency said. Sirleaf, who formally took office on Monday and is Africa's first elected woman head of state, recorded a video for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) urging Liberian exiles to consider returning to help rebuild their homeland.

The UN refugee body UNHCR signed an agreement with the governments of Kenya and Sudan to begin the voluntary repatriation of Sudanese refugees living in Kenya. But many southern Sudanese refugees say they are reluctant to return home until education, health, and other services can be provided in the southern part of Sudan, where infrastructures are limited or nonexistent due to 21 years of conflict. "Yes, it’s true, it’s going to take years before southern Sudan is going to reach the level of services that refugees have had in camps in neighboring countries," one refugee, Fakhouri, said. "But it’s going to happen much faster and in a more peaceful way if refugees themselves contribute by returning. The real builders will be returnees."

More than 220,000 Sudanese from Darfur have fled the ongoing violence in their region and crossed the border into the desert of eastern Chad. Most of the refugees are now in camps; however, several thousand remain outside camps, waiting to be registered. With the crisis continuing, it is estimated that many more refugees will flee to eastern Chad. In the midst of this crisis is the education and reproductive health of adolescent girls being neglected?

The international development agency ActionAid has expressed its deep disappointment after an Ethiopian court on January 08 refused bail to two anti-poverty activists who were arrested in early November. ActionAid Ethiopia’s policy head Daniel Bekele, and close partner Netsanet Demessie of the Organisation for Social Justice in Ethiopia (OSJE), were held for more than a month before they were charged with conspiring to overthrow the Ethiopian constitution. 125 other people, and four organisations, face this charge and up to six additional charges.

The Coalition for Peace in Africa (COPA) is a membership network of individuals and organisations working for sustainable peace in Africa. It aims to be a resource for African wisdom and expertise able to respond effectively to the conflicts besetting different parts of Africa. It connects people working for peace and development, human rights and related goals, in Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone countries throughout Africa. Twice a year, COPA holds a 5-week training workshop. This course covers diverse aspects of conflict transformation and peace building, and is aimed at building the capacity of participants, mostly from the African continent, working for development, human rights, peace, justice and related fields.

A Burundian human rights group has criticised the provisional release of 673 prisoners involved in the 1993 killing of the country's first democratically elected president and the ethnic reprisals it triggered. Human rights watchdog Ligue Iteka said the authorities' decision this week to free hundreds of detainees charged with political assassination, murder and breaching state security undermined Burundi's reconciliation efforts.

In an important milestone, the UN refugee agency on Thursday (January 12) signed the first of seven expected tripartite agreements that will clear the way for up to 70,000 refugees to return to South Sudan in the first half of this year. The agreement was signed in the Kenyan capital between the governments of Sudan, Kenya and UNHCR – exactly one year and three days after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended 21 years of north-south civil war in Sudan was also signed in Nairobi.

London-based development worker Chukwu Emeka-Chikezie explains how the northern-dominated aid industry and the Make Poverty History campaign have turned Africans into invisible objects and ignored the important role remittances play in tackling poverty. To really fight poverty, he says, increase migration from the developing world!

The National MultiCultural Institute (NMCI) launches a groundbreaking web portal that provides over 15,000 web entries of informational resources on issues related to human trafficking and modern-day slavery from around the world. HumanTraffickingSearch.net and its "deep search" engine provide information on related topics including: Human Trafficking, Child Labor, Bonded Labor and Sex Slavery. HumanTraffickingSearch.net offers a vast amount of information, updated regularly, on over 120 countries through a broad range of articles, research studies, congressional testimony, case studies, UNODC public service videos, a data map on child labor, and a daily news service.

A report by the UN Integrated Regional Information Networks contends that politically and socially, little changed in 2005 for Somalia, a nation of approximately 7 million. Having suffered a 14-year civil war, most of its citizens were optimistic that the year following the creation of a transitional federal government (TFG)would herald substantive change. Continued bickering within the TFG, however, dashed the hopes of many Somalis that the years of anarchy and chaos were coming to an end.

The brutal Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency enters its twentieth year with no end in sight, made more complicated by the troubling political events in Kampala over the past few months, including the arrest of opposition figures, notes the International Crisis Group in a new report. The ICG says the rebels' new strategy of ambushing vehicles, including those of humanitarian aid agencies, has worsened the humanitarian situation in northern Uganda; while peace processes in Sudan and the Congo (DRC) are being disrupted as the LRA crosses borders without response from the UN Security Council.

The latest bulletin from the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum headquarters in Harare includes the resolution that The African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights adopted on Zimbabwe during its 38th Session late last year. The issue contains a discussion of the fact finding mission report released early last year, as the main event leading up to the resolution being finally passed. Since the ACHPR 31st Session in Pretoria in May 2002, the Forum, together with human rights organisations from other parts of Africa and other partners, has fought for a resolution to be passed.

International migration is a powerful symbol of global inequality, whether in terms of wages, labour market opportunities, or lifestyles. Millions of workers and their families move each year across borders and across continents, seeking to reduce what they see as the gap between their own position and that of people in other, wealthier, places. In turn, there is a growing consensus in the development field that migration represents an important livelihood diversification strategy for many of the world's poorest nations.

They were born in southern Sudan but fled during the war. These young people are returning after years spent in refugee camps. In those camps the students say they were treated with suspicion. And they were always well aware that they were not citizens of their host nation. Mabe Bosco is twenty four years old and is anxious to feel like a Sudanese citizen for the first time in his life. Those who plan to return are not moving back under ideal conditions. The young people say they are well aware that they face enormous obstacles but they will not give up.

The human rights culture is still very green in the African Union, contends this commentary in South Africa's Sunday Tribune newspaper. "This became most apparent this week when a resolution by the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights condemning human rights abuses in Zimbabwe finally came to light," says the commentary, going on to note that, "The resolution was adopted more than a month ago, but was never published and only came to light this week because it was leaked to journalists."

West Africa, the world's poorest region, chalked up successes in 2005, with war-battered Liberia and Sierra Leone edging closer to lasting peace. But perennial problems such as corruption and unemployment could still scupper progress, and elsewhere in the region prospects remained bleak.

Ahead of the upcoming series of debates on disarmament due to take place at the United Nations, a report by Amnesty International seeks to highlight stories from the DRC which reveal the human cost of the arms trade over the past few years. According to a humanitarian officer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, "there are so many weapons here that each person makes his own law. There is practically complete impunity. Anyone who holds a weapon has authority over anyone and can threaten anyone."