The World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP)is convening a gathering of religious leaders in Nairobi, Kenya, between June 9-12 to discuss the impact of HIV/AIDS on children and to launch a continent-wide campaign to further engage religious communities in efforts to expand care and to reduce the stigma often associated with AIDS.

When he strolls the boulevards of his adoptive French city with his 9-year-old daughter, Bel-kacem Djedid senses in her a kind of loss, or maybe just a notion that she is different from the people around her. "I see it in her eyes, in the sadness there," said Djedid, an Algerian. Maybe, he said, speaking by telephone from Lyon, it is the fact that her clothes are Red Cross hand-me-downs or that he cannot afford the fancy toys that betoken Europe's prosperity or the vacations that her classmates enjoy. "Sometimes she says, 'Why am I not like them?'" Djedid said, speaking of her classmates. "And I say that, one day, the time will come and you will be like them." What basically makes the Djedid family different is that they are asylum seekers, hoping to qualify as refugees. That status means that they and hundreds of thousands of others like them across Europe are denied normal lives because of a web of bureaucratic constraints and ambiguities sometimes worthy of Kafka. Now more than ever, as it seeks to expand its membership, the 15-nation European Union confronts a crucial decision on whether to embrace outsiders, as the United States does, or to reject them as intruders. But with rightist forces gaining ground, people like Djedid and his daughter are also the subject of a rising resentment, like that preached by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who shocked France this month by earning a place in the second round of national elections for president.

Scratch the surface of post-apartheid South Africa, and deep-rooted racism lurks underneath. Almost every week, newspapers carry reports of another racist attack, or a racially motivated murder. "People's attitudes haven't changed," says Dr Zonke Majodina, a commissioner at the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC). Apartheid bred racial hatred, but what does it take for a person to act on these deep-seated hostile impulses?

Some 25,000 refugees living in Djibouti are at risk of malnutrition, the World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Thursday. It said supplies for the refuges were "rapidly running out" and appealed for an emergency 8,000 mt of food to deal with the crisis.

MONUC, the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has accused the Rwandan-backed Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD-Goma) armed opposition movement of "grave violations of human rights and humanitarian law" in the eastern DRC city of Kisangani, where the RCD is the de facto administrative authority.

There was a steady build-up of soldiers in two of Madagascar's provincial towns on Thursday as president Marc Ravalomanana reiterated his intention to take military action if the blockade of the capital, Antananarivo, was not dismantled within four days. Aid agencies told IRIN that the southern town of Tulear, and Mahajanga in the north were "extremely tense" as armed forces seem to prepare for what is expected to be a crucial showdown between Ravalomanana's men and backers of former president Didier Ratsiraka.

The Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (HRVIC) has submitted its preliminary report to President Olusegun Obasanjo with a strong recommendation for compensation to be paid to victims of human rights violations as a way of achieving genuine reconciliation.

As the US Congress continues its investigation of the Enron affair, human rights advocates are calling for a probe of the Bush administration's possible role in another energy and influence-peddling scandal. According to a recent report by the British-based non-governmental organization Global Witness, Bush and US oil interests have ties to some of the key figures in the arms-for-oil scandal which has devastated Angola.

Genocide suspect Ferdinand Nahimana led one of the 'public salvation committees' formed to purge ethnic Tutsi from Rwandan educational institutions in the 1970's, Alison Des Forges, a Rwandan historian and Human Rights Watch advisor, yesterday told judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

The acronyms littered on walls and signposts bear testimony to the work NGOs and UN agencies have been doing to help make life livable for refugees in southern Guinea. From medical centres to latrines, from canteens to technical schools, most essential services were initiated by the humanitarian community. But the people spearheading the fight against drugs in Kountaya, one of the refugee camps in Albadaria, southern Guinea, are neither NGO officials nor UN staffers. Their Community Action Against Drug Abuse (CAADA), is an association formed by refugees themselves.

Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is facing a massive shortfall in funding but its interim secretariat is hopeful that funds will be forthcoming, Ilan Lax, Policy Adviser to the Interim Secretariat, told IRIN on Tuesday. The TRC has so far received a commitment of US $500,000 from Britain out of a total budget of $9.6 million.

In just five months the relatively calm Indian Ocean island of Madgascar has been riven by a political row that has seen almost 60 people killed since January and more than 65,000 jobs lost. The World Bank on Tuesday said the economic fallout from the protracted crisis could spell disaster for the poorest of the poor in the country. The leadership wrangle began in January when Marc Ravalomanana, the charismatic mayor of the capital, organised mass protests accusing incumbent president Didier Ratsiraka of rigging the December polls in an effort to prolong his 23-year rule. The crisis recently turned uglier with incidents of clashes between two of the country's largest ethnic groups. IRIN asked Madagascar specialist Stephen Ellis at the African Studies Institute in Leiden, Netherlands, how a country known more for its vanilla exports and sandy beaches became one of Africa's hotspots.

Like many other NGOs, Greenpeace has been disappointed by the Chairman´s text. We find that the proposal represents already – before negotiations have even started in earnest – the lowest common denominator. It lacks ambition, it lacks vision, targets and time-tables. Furthermore, with its emphasis on partnerships and private sector voluntary agreements the Chairman´s text proposes that governments in effect abdicate their own responsibilities. The mission of the United Nations is to bring governments and nations together for the common good. The proposal to abandon this mission, and to unite corporations instead is not in keeping with the mandate that was given to the Preparatory Committee and the WSSD by the UN General Assembly on 20 December 2000 when the UNGA adopted Resolution A/RES/55/199.

This new, updated and extensively revised edition of Searching for Peace is one of the first books to bridge the gap between peace and conflict studies, world order and globalisation. Revealing deep structures and deep cultures of violence and finding in them the reasons for increasing violence and peacekeeping failures, it presents the lessons that can be learned from the TRANSCEND approach, adopted as a UN training guide. A critical and piercing analysis of the shortcomings of conventional approaches to conflict resolution, realpolitik, and worsening dynamics of global violence which, if not resolved, threaten even more catastrophic destruction in the future. The book maps the conditions and paths to sustainable peace, and the challenge for peace by peaceful means.

The human rights conditions on U.S. military aid and training programs that have been put in place over the past few decades have been pushed aside in the headlong rush into the global war on terrorism. Human rights abuses are being ignored or forgotten as the U.S. arms its allies in this new war. The goal is freedom, no matter what the cost and no matter what the human rights practices of our new partners. Defending his military budget, Bush said "I've asked for the largest increase in defense spending in 20 years not only because it will fulfill our commitment to support our troops, but because it recognizes that this country is in our war for the long pull--that we're interested in defending freedom no matter what the cost."

Facing threats of arrest, the Ugandan acting army commander, Maj-Gen James Kazini, testified on Monday before a six-member judicial commission set up by the government to investigate allegations of the nation's involvement in the illegal exploitation of natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the commission's chairman, Justice David Porter, a British expatriate, told IRIN on Tuesday.

At least 5,000 people have been trapped since 31 March in the town of Kindamba, in the Pool region of the Republic of Congo (ROC), and the Congolese government has not yet granted the international community access to assess humanitarian needs there, the office of the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator reported on Monday.

The EC has allocated 2.6 million euros (about US $2.3 million) to support peace initiatives in Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia under its Rapid Reaction Mechanism (RRM).

The group of refugees listened intently as a visiting UN official praised their resilience. They nodded approvingly as Kinsgley Amaning, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Guinea, urged them to reflect on their experiences so as to help steer their countries in the right direction when they returned home. His message 'say no to violence', appeared to strike a chord among the over 200 mainly Sierra Leonean refugees present at the meeting in Telikoro camp in Albadaria, southern Guinea. Then one refugee, middle aged with dark glasses stood up. A humanitarian worker said later he was blind. "You have spoken on behalf of the Sierra Leoneans. We are still at war. What is our fate?" asked the man, whom someone identified as Pa Camara. "Some of us are afraid," he continued. "We're not going back. In 1997, when there were elections in Liberia, many people went. You saw what happened. So as we tell our Sierra Leonean brothers farewell, think of what to do for the Liberians."

Royal Dutch Shell, the British-based oil giant, have insisted that it was not aware its aviation fuel was being supplied to Sudanese combat aircraft one year after its chairman publicly pledged that the company would "take steps to ensure" that such supplies were cut off.