The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, California invites policy makers and activists from countries undergoing political, economic and social transitions to participate in its second annual summer fellows program on democracy, development, and the rule of law to be held July 31 - August 18, 2006 at Stanford University on its California campus.

Are you interested in studying rights-based approaches to development? Do you wish to deepen your understanding of the impact of globalisation on human rights and social justice in the world? The MA specialisation Human Rights, Development and Social Justice (4 September 2006 – 14 December 2007) of the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, The Netherlands, provides students with a broad understanding of the theoretical and practical links between human rights, development and social justice, through a multidisciplinary examination of keyissues in these areas. For more information, including downloadable application forms, check www.iss.nl or contact the ISS student office ([email protected]) or, for substantive questions, the HDS Convenor, Dr. Karin Arts ([email protected]). The application deadlines are 15 January 2006 for those who after admission wish to apply to the Netherlands Fellowship Programme, and 1 July 2006 for others. ISS also offers a 7 weeks certificate course for experienced human rights activists: 'Development, Law and Social Justice' which is designed to promote experiential learning and academic reflection on human rights issues and activism.

Zimbabwean prosecutors have withdrawn corruption charges against President Robert Mugabe's nephew, Leo Mugabe. Leo Mugabe and his wife, Veronica, walked free Wednesday [16 November] before they had entered their pleas. Mugabe and his wife were facing charges of contravening the Grain Marketing Board [GMB] Act and the Customs and Excise Duty Act. They were arrested three weeks ago after police acted on claims that in 2003, the two diverted 30 tonnes of flour worth 147m Zimbabwean dollars to Mozambique without having been cleared in terms of the law.

As she prepares to take office on January 16, 2006, President-in-waiting Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf says officials wishing to work in her government will have to abide by a code of conduct that will guide them against corruption, dishonesty, inefficiency and human rights abuses. "Anybody who will work for the government will have to abide by that code of conduct," she told reporters Saturday in the village of Korma, her ancestral home, over 15 kilometers northwest of Monrovia, where she had traveled to thank the people "for standing behind me" in her quest for the presidency. "If they (officials) violate public trust through dishonesty, inefficiency and human rights abuse, they will be penalized in accordance with the law as prescribed by the code of conduct."

President Armando Guebuza made what AIM called "his strongest criticisms yet of corruption, sloth and ineffectiveness within the country's judicial system, which was effectively denying the rights for which the liberation struggle had been fought", in a speech to senior legal figures on 5 November. To turn the system around, Guebuza said, "we cannot continue tolerating indifference and apathy in our administration of justice, using the pretext that a huge amount of work has accumulated - when we know perfectly well that the greatest problem is the spirit of 'don't bother' - expressed in the lack of timely orders to undertake specific actions, or, if they are ordered, failure to check that they are carried out".

A book suggestion for your readers:  Race and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1848-1865,  3rd edition.  This is a serious treatment of US racism/ethnocentrism.  Thank you.

I am trying to publicise as widely as possible what is happening now in Ethiopia - but without jeopardizing the possibilities for getting a visa to go back asap. So please do not mention my name if you decide to publicise the following.

I was in Addis working with ILO last week during the strike. Reports were very varied and contradictory, but what seems to have happened is:

1) the opposition had called for a one week strike immediately following Eid to enable Muslims also to join the protest against Meles’ rigging of the elections.

2) something sparked resistance early. This led to at least 50 people shot dead at random by the military – they do not speak the same language and have also been trained to be extra aggressive. The deaths included children and women trying to prevent their sons being taken away. Most of the resistance from the people was just in the form of roadblocks and stones. At least one person was shot dead just in front of a factory I was visiting.

3) 3,000 at least have now been detained and shipped to detention camps in the desert including all opposition leaders, human rights activists and journalists.

4) Government is also blocking any forms of communication it can eg the independent Amharic station.

I do hope you can make these facts widely known so the repression can stop and the detainees released – and also use any networks you have to update/correct any of the above information. Unfortunately all my contacts are too scared to speak at this time.

It seems the only way of getting world attention is to blow up a few tourists or set a few cars alight in the streets of Paris. BBC and CNN seemed more interested in Charles and Camilla's visit to US.

I have just finished reading your comprehensive editorial on events unfolding in Tunis and send my sympathy to journalists in general and human rights activists in particular.

I think the UN must not sit down unconcerned for that country's authorities to treat communicators as common criminals. What is the purpose of the Summit in the first place? What a shame!

Windows, bridges and cafes. That’s how blogs were described in a panel discussion at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis on Thursday. The discussion, entitled “Expression under Repression”, was organized by Dutch non-governmental organisation Hivos and Global Voices, a non-profit global citizens’ media project. Blogs, which are a form of citizen’s publishing that makes it easy for people with internet access to run their own website, were windows because they shone a light not only on the inside of a country but also gave a view of the outside world. They were bridges because they created social islands in divided countries, for the first time giving a voice to marginalized communities such as women. They were cafes because they created a space away from the monopoly of the government where important debates could take place that might have long-term political effects.

This was how Iranian blogger and event panelist Hoosein Derackshan saw the effects of blogging on his country, where about 10 percent of the population have internet access and where there are an estimated 700 000 blogs. Blogs had become a phenomenon in the country, he said, presenting a threat to the government who were afraid of the organizing potential of the internet and its possible disruption to the social and political order.

In the lead up to the event, it was unclear whether or not it would go ahead. The Tunisian authorities had indicated that they were unhappy with any events that dealt with the subject of freedom of expression or human rights and had marked out five events due to be held at the official exhibition centre – the Kram exhibition centre outside Tunis – that they felt did not keep strictly with the theme of information and communications for development. High-level diplomatic interventions meant that the event was eventually able to go ahead, but throughout the period in which it was held there was wrangling in the corridors outside between Tunisian authority representatives and event organizers. At one stage during the meeting instructions were given to those attending that they were not allowed to hand out material to those assembled. The WSIS has been marred by the Tunisian authorities barring an alternative civil society meeting, by attacks on journalists and by the disruption of meetings.

Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, said a powerful shift was taking place in terms of global citizens media, which had the potential to democratize the media. In the past there had been no way to access and understand what people in other countries were saying, but as a result of the internet and the development of blogging, people were able to share their voices with the rest of the world.

While some people had questioned how relevant the internet was to the improvement of economic and social well being, it was critical because without individual empowerment development was not sustainable. Censorship was therefore very much connected with impeding development.

The issue of increased attempts by governments to control the internet came under the spotlight in a presentation by Nart Villeneuve, director of technical research at the Citizen’s Lab. Villeneuve has been studying filtering of the internet for the last three years. He described how states were beginning to create borders in cyber space through placing controls on the points of centralization on the internet infrastructure. Filtering was described as a specific technique used to implement controls and was in most cases about content. It could be implemented in various ways, from software on personal machines or through specialized technology at Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or upstream at international connection points.

Most of the technology used for filtering was imported from the US, as was the case in Tunisia, where a US company had supplied the technology for blocking websites.

For the most part, governments were not transparent or accountable in their filtering activities. Some denied that it happened at all or obscured the fact that filtering was in place. Most were unable to answer what the blocking criteria was, or if there was a review or grievance process.

For the most part, filtering began as attempts to control content such as pornography, but an interesting trend, said Villeneuve, was that once filtering began it tended to migrate into other areas, with filtering seen as a quick fix to a larger social or political problem.

One of the worrying trends was that countries relied on commercial products for filtering, meaning that control over what was filtered therefore got ceded to the company developing the technology. There was also a large amount of “collateral damage” involved in filtering in that blocking one website could often lead to the blocking of thousands of others.

Filtering was in effect one mechanism and was linked with repressive controls and laws that caused people to self-censor. Reverse filtering was another problem, whereby filtering took place on the basis of geographic location. For example, because of the US embargo on Iran, websites were blocked for US web surfers.

Villeneuve said in some countries a “national interest” model was being pursued, with countries creating what were effectively intranets that could be accessed from within the country at lower cost than the international network. This meant that the local content would only be approved content and only wealthier internet users would be able to access the mainstream internet.

“What we are seeing is that non-transparent filtering is starting to turn into forms of political censorship and this has an impact on the internet and on democratic participation in a country. What filtering does is to isolate nodes of a network and cut them off – isolating them so that they can be more easily repressed. This is the opposite of what the internet is meant to be,” Villeneuve said.

Taurai Maduna, information officer for www.kubatana, a forum for civil society voices in Zimbabwe, also spoke as a panelist at the event. He said freedom of expression in Zimbabwe had been eroded through a variety of factors including repressive legislation such as the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). Adopted in 2002, POSA had been used by the government to make it difficult to hold public meetings. AIPPA had contributed to curtailing people’s freedom of expression. Zimbabwe media had been shrinking over the years.

He said the internet remained one of the few uncensored methods of communication and information dissemination and described the use of the internet to distribute information relevant to the civil society sector in Zimbabwe, the powerful use of email in civil society campaigns and Kubatana’s involvement in the training of organisations in the use of email and the internet in their activities. “You find that most civil society organisations, when a human rights violation happens, don’t know how to disseminate the information. Using email they can get the word out.” “What Kubatana does is to focus on local content – there is a lot of content out there but not a lot that focuses on Zimbabwe. We are helping Zimbabwean organisations to come together.”

* Please send comments to [email protected]

This week's Pambazuka is brought to you directly from Tunis, the city hosting this year's World Summit on the Information Society. This summit is about making access to the internet universal, it is about the fine sentiments of democracy, accountability and good governance in relation to the internet. Yet it has been the venue for severe and systematic repression of civil society voices, the use of bureaucratic meddling to prevent democratic discussion and, ironically, making access to the internet a logistical nightmare. For this reason, this week's Pambazuka News is shorter than usual (we can hear sighs of relief from some, and groans of disappointment from others). Normal service will be resumed next week.

EDITORIAL: Patrick Burnett reports from Tunis on WSIS and the attempts by the authorities to block plans to hold an alternative civil society forum.
COMMENT & ANALYSIS:
- IFEX launch protest against repression
- The internet is not as accessible as people think
- How 'big brother' can watch what you're doing
- A brief history of Tunisia
and links to news sites
BLOGGING AFRICA: Sokari Ekine focuses on what bloggers have to say at WSIS
PAN AFRICAN POSTCARD: Tajudeen returns with commentary on political unrest has been widespread in Ethiopia since May elections and calls for calm on both sides.
BOOKS & ARTS:
Book Review: The Trial and Other Stories by Ifeoma Okoye
Poem: The Charade is Over - Requiem for the Ogoni 9, by Rotimi Sankore
GCAP: More than 40 representatives of youth, women’s networks, national coalitions, faith-based organizations organized in Africa gathered in Harare last week.
CONFLICTS & EMERGENCIES: New report claims AU troops in Darfur have made a difference
WOMEN & GENDER: Pambazuka News continues its analysis of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, focusing this week on land rights
ELECTIONS & GOVERNANCE: Women contenders for parliament in Egypt demand greater representation
DEVELOPMENT: Water privatisation critised by report
HIV/AIDS: South Africans to test candidate Aids vaccine
and much more ...

STOP PRESS

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: REGISTRATION POSTPONED TO NOV 30

Registration of self organized activities for the polycentric WSF 2006 – which will take place in Bamako (Mali), Caracas (Venezuela) and Karachi (Pakistan), in January, 2006 – were postponed until November 30th. Attention: there will be no further postponement! Over 3,400 organizations have already registered at the activities registration website. By the morning of November 16th, a total amount of 2,100 activities were registered for the three events.

Registration at the African venue in Bamako, Mali, have been slow. Pambazuka News urges African civil society organisations and activists to make sure that the Mali event represents the full range of African voices. Register Now! Contact [email protected] Bamako (Mali) or visit http://www.wsf2006.org/

The Tunisian authorities prevented foreign and Tunisian associations, including Front Line, from holding a meeting to organize a “Citizens Summit” in parallel with the UN World Summit on Information Technology (WSIS) in Tunis on Monday 14th November. Front Line, together with other NGOs, cancelled planned parallel events in the main conference centre which should have been held on Tuesday 15th November as a protest against the activities of the Tunisian authorities and the ongoing harassment of Tunisian human rights defenders. Over fifty policemen, who refused to identify themselves, prevented NGO members from entering the German Cultural Centre in Tunis. They shoved the participants and pushed one to the ground. The Citizen’s Summit on Information Society official website has also been blocked in Tunisia and is only accessible from The WSIS Media Centre.

Andrew Anderson, Deputy Director of Front Line, one of the participants said: "It is outrageous that the Tunisian authorities are using these bullying tactics at a world summit. They are showing a visible contempt for freedom of association and assembly."

http://www.andycarvin.com/
http://www.wsis-wire.net/content/view/1171/
http://www.mraihi.com/blog
http://www.mraihi.com/blog
http://panos.blogs.com/iwitness
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wsis&btnG=Google+Search
www.panos.org.uk/iwitness/
http://www.dailysummit.net/
http://www.highwayafrica.ru.ac.za/hana/
http://hrw.org/reports/2005/mena1105/

Since the earliest of times, Tunis has been an area of struggle, invaded by first the Phoenicians and later taken over by the Romans, who were in turn forced out by maurauding barbarian hordes that swept through Europe in the 5th century and were followed by Arab and Turkish empires.

Later, when the Allies under General Eisenhower landed in North Africa in November 1942, the Germans and Italians seized Tunis as an operations base for the forces of Rommel. The area was the scene of fierce fighting between the Germans and the Allies, until the Allied forces triumphed in 1943. Following the war, the struggle for independence from the French gained ground, leading to bloody clashes and the eventual declaration of a republic in 1957 with Habib Bourguiba as first president.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ousted Bourguiba in a bloodless coup on 7 November 1987, promising to lead the country toward democracy and releasing political prisoners. But after January 1992, President Ben Ali started using the civil war in neighbouring Algeria as an excuse to stifle basic rights, mainly freedom of expression, says the Tunisian Monitoring Group, a body of freedom of expression organisations set up to monitor the human rights situation in Tunisia in the lead up to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Opposition and independent papers were closed down and journalists and hundreds of political activists, most of them Islamists, were imprisoned following unfair trials, particularly in the early 1990s, says a TMG report.

Later, the Tunisian government used the attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001, to further restrict freedom of association, movement, and expression. A new law criminalizing freedom of expression was passed at the end of 2003 allegedly to support “the international efforts in matters of the fight against terrorism and money laundering.” As reported by TMG, The Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) said after the promulgation of this law, “the year 2003 has been marked by the promulgation of laws of an unprecedented serious character in terms of their violation of the right to information.”

The Tunisian government could be able to monitor the activities and movements of each of the thousands of delegates to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). That’s because the credit card-like registration badges that every delegate is issued with when registering for the summit contain a chip that has to be swiped when entering the summit facility - the Kram exhibition centre outside Tunis. Theoretically, this could enable the Tunisian authorities to store and access information about each delegate, but also to know which area of the summit venue each delegate is in and who else is in the same area.

The same system was used in Geneva and caused an uproar. “We don’t actually know, but I don’t think it tells anyone that I’m actually sitting in this room. There is less control,” said an internet policy expert, when questioned about the issue at a press conference.

Whether the Tunisian government is or isn’t using the technology to track the movements of delegates, its impossible not to feel watched in Tunis. High security at any major international summit has become the norm and Tunis is no exception.

Police gather on seemingly every street corner, while “men in suits” are everywhere, lining the highways and patrolling the corridors of the summit. At parallel civil society events that have addressed the issue of the human rights situation in Tunisia, security has been noticeably in attendance. When I tried to enter the venue for an event on Tuesday I was blocked by two security officials who told me that the venue was full. When I eventually got inside after one of the organizers intervened, there were plenty of seats available.

The entire area around the summit centre has been cleared of vegetation and roadblocks are common in the roads leading to the summit. Delegates are bussed into the exhibition centre from hotels and only authorized busses are allowed near the centre. Without an official badge or other forms of official authorization, it is impossible to enter the summit area.

In this context, its hard not to feel watched, and its hard not to feel that the summit is really a domain of the “haves” who have to be protected from the “have-nots”.

This article examines the anti-corruption initiatives of the African Union (AU) and New Partnership for Africa_s Development (NEPAD) and analyses their effectiveness. It also explores the phenomenon of corruption in Africa more generally and follows with some recommendations on how to tackle it. The author concludes that the best role the AU and NEPAD can play to combat and prevent corruption in Africa is by complementing and strengthening grassroots and national measures and by promoting regional anti-corruption norms.

Forum for Democratic Change President Kizza Besigye was yesterday committed to the High Court for trial on charges of treason and rape. He is to appear in the High Court. Buganda Road Court turned down his lawyers' application for special treatment, including food. The Magistrate, Ms Margaret Tibulya, argued that her court didn't have the powers to grant the defence's application. He advised Besigye's team to get in touch with Luzira Prison's authority.

The marketing line of Skype, the internet telephony phenomenon, is “The whole world can talk for free”. That one line captures so much that is thrilling about the internet. Somehow the novelty of being able to cross boundaries, communicate and network in ways that weren’t possible before never seems to wear off, especially with new innovations popping up almost daily. Yet that one line dreamed up by the marketing experts also highlights the problem faced by the internet. This lies in the fact that unless you have a computer with broadband access you can’t talk to the world, or if you can - using traditional telephony - you certainly can’t do it for free. And because this goes for the majority of the world’s population, that means that those of us that do have access and can talk for free certainly aren’t talking to the world. We are in fact, talking to ourselves, at the expense of the world.

The theory goes like this: Providing information and communications technologies will enable people to access and create opportunities and is therefore key to development, although it’s a moot point as to whether development comes first and ICTs later. But this is why the digital divide – the gap between the information have’s and have-not’s - is such a disaster, because there are so many people without access that the development potential of the internet can never be truly realized. Only 1% of the world’s internet users are Africans, for example.

And to really drive the point home: Africa - the continent that everyone knows is the poorest in the world - has to pay seven times as much per kilobyte of data transferred via the internet than do the advanced capitalist countries.

It’s little surprise therefore, that the digital divide is one of the major themes of the WSIS process. This is not to say, though, that a solution is in hand, with historical differences of opinion over how to fund a closing of the gap leading to a lack of decisive action. Any previous suggestions for a global tax, for example, to fund the closing of the gap, has previously been opposed by those who state that that the market must take care of the problem, despite evidence that spending is down and that in the last two decades the gap has shown no signs of shrinking.

At the previous WSIS meeting in Geneva in 2003, a Digital Solidarity Fund was proposed as one way to bridge the digital divide. As a result the final Geneva summit declaration acknowledged that funding for investment in ICTs was an important issue, and requested the UN Secretary General to establish a Task Force to review the current availability of funding and report to the second part of the Summit, in Tunis. This Task Force on Financial Mechanisms for ICT for Development presented its report in December 2004. Although the idea of the Digital Solidarity Fund did not receive universal backing at WSIS, it continued to gather support, and the Fund was set up in March 2005, with a secretariat based in Geneva, but the challenge lay in collecting enough funds to make it viable. More information on this issue can be found by visiting www.panos.org.uk/iwitness/, where the information for this paragraph on the Fund was sourced from the Panos Media Toolkit No. 3 on ICT’s.

While how to finance the narrowing of the digital divide is a key component of the Tunis summit, who governs it was the topic of the moment in the lead up to the event. The key debates centre around a concern that if corporate interests gain control of the internet it will have serious implications for the extent to which access is made available to all. But calls for reform of internet governance – currently residing under the US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) – have raised fears that some governments might seek to control the internet at the expense of freedom of expression.

There are therefore two main views on internet governance. Firstly, there are those that want to maintain the status quo, with some reforms. The other view wants to see the internet come under control of the international system as a way to ensure more transparency and accountability. Increasingly, there is also a feeling that the ultimate power of the US government over Icann, even if it is only potential and not actually used, is an obstacle to a fully international, open and equitable system. This information on Icann was sourced from the Panos Media Toolkit on ICTs, No1, available from the website www.panos.org.uk/iwitness/.

The US, however, is strongly opposed to reform and believes that the internet is best served by maintaining Icann as the current system. This deadlock has meant that predictions in the lead up to the summit were that it would pack up without concrete agreement. This has indeed been the case, with civil society generally disappointed with the outcomes of the summit and weak language expected from governments in the final summit statement – essentially language designed to cover up the failure of the summit.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

President Eduardo Dos Santos used the occasion of Angola's independence day celebrations to deliver a speech promising elections and greater prosperity, but critics said he failed to outline a proper timetable for the polls. Thousands - including Portugal's president and several African leaders - turned up at Luanda's Cidadela football stadium on Friday for the festivities, the biggest celebrations since independence from Portugal 30 years ago. "The reality that the country is living today allows us to look with optimism to the realisation of the next elections," Dos Santos said in a rare address to the nation. "We are creating the material, institutional and psychological conditions for them to be free, transparent and with a high level of participation."

The creation of a government of national unity was meant to unite war-torn Sudan following the January signing of the southern peace agreement, but analysts have cautioned that recent political developments could jeopardise national unity. Among other challenges, these events show that Sudan's ruling elite still seem reluctant to share power with the former southern rebels as stipulated under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), one analyst said.

The Independent Electoral Commission of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) announced on Monday (November 14) that 150,199 people had been caught registering to vote twice. Commission Chairman Apollinaire Malumalu said 300,398 of the names on the voter list had been registered twice with the same fingerprints. "Any voter who deliberately registers more than once will be struck off the electoral list," he said, referring to the article 45 in the country's voter bill. So far, cases of fraud have been only discovered in Kinshasa where registration ended in July. Registration started there late and is still taking place in several provinces because of logistical problems particularly in Bandundu and Equateur.