Evidence continues to mount that the government of Rwanda has been
harboring, supporting, and arming war criminals and mutineers, including
Bosco Ntaganda, in neighboring eastern Congo. Former rebels from the
Rwanda-linked National Congress for the Defense of the People, or CNDP,
and an affiliated offshoot group called the M23 movement are currently
in open rebellion against the government in Kinshasa and fighting the
Congolese national army, or FARDC. Further, recent documents leaked by
the United Nations Mission to Congo, or MONUSCO, as well as several
interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch and corroborated by the
Enough Project field team are pointing to the government of Rwanda
forcibly recruiting men and boys into the Rwandan army, or RDF, sending
them to fight as rebels for M23 in eastern Congo, and summarily
executing them if they prove too weak or try to escape.
Additionally, as part of its annual reporting process, the U.N. Group of
Experts on Congo conducted an investigation into the allegations of
Rwandan support to the M23 rebellion in Congo. In the process of
briefing U.N. Security Council member states as part of the group’s
interim report process, the results of this investigation were shared.
Several U.N. diplomats as well as NGOs have confirmed that the
investigation uncovered evidence of direct Rwandan involvement in the
rebellion. Several sources also indicated that this group is best suited
to continue investigation into the matter through the remainder of this
year. Read more
Hundreds of thousands of people are killed, injured, raped, repressed
and forced to flee their homes every year as a result of the
international arms trade. Families are torn apart. Livelihoods and lives
are destroyed. Armed conflicts destroy social and economic
infrastructure, breed corruption and divert public finances, denying the
poor access to health care, water, food, shelter and education,
increasing poverty and causing yet more deaths.
For decades there has been a global treaty on the import, export and
transfer of dinosaur bones yet there is no global treaty to strictly
control the deadly trade in conventional arms. Revolvers, rifles,
machine guns, bullets, hand grenades, missiles, rockets, armoured
vehicles and other weapons and arms can be traded between governments,
arms dealers and armed groups with few restrictions. Unscrupulous
governments allow almost unlimited amounts of arms to be supplied to
those flagrantly violating human rights and destroying lives.
Regulation at the country level has failed to adapt to an increasingly
globalized trade – components are sourced from across the world, and
production and assembly take place in different countries. It’s time for
all governments to commit to securing an international Arms Trade
Treaty. Read more
Flawed processes, unlawful detentions, and dire conditions in South
Sudan’s prisons reflect the urgent need to improve the new nation’s
fledgling justice system, Human Rights Watch said in a report released
today.
The 105-page report, “Prison Is Not for Me: Arbitrary Detention in South
Sudan,” documents violations of due process rights, patterns of
wrongful deprivation of liberty, and the harsh, unacceptable prison
conditions in which detainees live. The research was done during a
10-month period before and after South Sudan’s independence, on July 9,
2011.
“The experience of those in detention in South Sudan reveals serious
flaws in the emerging justice system,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa
director at Human Rights Watch. “South Sudan is a new country and badly
needs an effective justice system that upholds human rights and dignity.
It is a fundamental building block for establishing rule of law and
accountability.” Read more
Indications are that, with continued international support and pressure,
Somalia's Transition Roadmap will continue towards its goal of handing
over to a caretaker administration on 20 August, 2012.
As such, Somalia's international partners should focus in the next few
months on how to transform the momentum injected into the Roadmap
process into policy attention and diplomatic support, or pressure,
needed to see the caretaker administration develop into more of a
government. A more functional government would focus on the provision of
services beyond the attention already paid to the security sector.
The end of the Roadmap will not signal an end to Somalia's transition.
The new administration will face many of the same challenges threatening
the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), and some others generated by
the Roadmap process itself. However some progress has been made in
Mogadishu, and Somalis – especially in civil society and the private
sector – are in a position to build upon that base. Constructive
international engagement could support that process. Read more
An Eritrean national told police he had
been walking in a south Tel Aviv park when he was set upon without cause by
three teenagers. In addition to absorbing blows, the man said, he was also
pelted with rocks in the attack.
The migrant managed to flee his
attackers, and arrived at a local police station to file a
complaint.
Within minutes, police escorted him to the scene of the
attack, and soon, the man spotted three boys aged 14 and 16 and recognized them
as the attackers.
Officers proceeded to arrest the suspects. Police are
treating the incident as a hate crime.
The victim sustained bruising in
the attack and received medical attention.
Last month, a gang of 12
youths from south Tel Aviv were arrested on suspicion of launching a series of
assaults on African migrants in south Tel Aviv.
Police believe the
suspects, most of whom are minors, assaulted the migrants on several
occasions.
During some of the assaults, the suspects allegedly beat
victims with clubs, while in others, pepper spray was involved, police
suspect.
African migrants have regularly reported being attacked in the
neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv, often by young men riding up on motorscooters
and assaulting them or throwing rocks or bottles at them before speeding
off.
Last Saturday night, two men on a motorscooter drove up to an
Eritrean-owned bar in the Hatikva neighborhood and threw a firecracker inside
the establishment, leaving one patron lightly injured.
The same bar was
ransacked during anti-migrant rioting that took place after a protest against
asylum-seekers in the neighborhood in late May.
The deportation of the 700- 1,500 South Sudanese in Israel barely
scratches the surface of solving the migrant problem facing the country,
Interior Minister Eli Yishai said Sunday evening, as a group of 123
South Sudanese prepared to board a midnight flight home to Juba.
Yishai said the real problem “is with Eritrea that has 30,000 people
[in Israel] and north Sudan with 15,000,” adding that he hopes “that the
legal obstacles to this will be lifted soon and we can expel them as
well.”
Yishai admitted that the South Sudanese make up only a “drop within a
drop” of the 60,000 or so African migrants in Israel, but added that
deporting them is a “national interest” and that if he “has to chose
between the interests of Israel and the interests of the Sudanese, I
will choose Israel.”
Currently Israel cannot legally deport migrants from Sudan, an enemy
state where they would stand to face persecution upon return, or
Eritreans, who are citizens of a police state and would potentially be
in grave danger if sent back. As a result, both groups are granted group
protection status and cannot be deported, giving them de-facto refugee
status without the rights that refugee status affords.
As Yishai spoke, South Sudanese men, women, and children were being
processed for their midnight flights behind mounds of suitcases inside
Ben-Gurion Airport’s Terminal 1. They will be joined on the charter
flight by four members of a South Sudan diplomatic delegation that came
to Israel last Thursday to oversee the administration of the
deportations and meet with local members of the South Sudanese community
in Israel.
Gidon Cohen, the head of the encouragement of willful repatriation
department of the Population, Immigration and Border Authority, said
that each South Sudanese adult received $1,300 in cash,
with an additional $500 for each minor traveling with them. They were
also given vaccines against diseases common to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Cohen said each passenger was allowed to carry 30kg. of luggage. Many
of the suitcases clogging up the entry to Terminal 1 were left by
families who had exceeded their luggage limit, and Cohen said he had no
idea if the luggage would be shipped to them or remain behind in Israel.
The first leg of the deportation of the South Sudanese community of
Israel began early Sunday morning, when a bus full of South Sudanese
left Eilat to make its way to the airport. It was followed by a bus
leaving Arad at 9 a.m., while the rest of the deportees left from the
Tel Aviv Central Bus Station at midday.
Escorted by friends and trailed by cameramen and reporters, dozens of
South Sudanese men, women, and children filled into buses on the
seventh floor of the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. As they loaded their
bags onto the bus in the midday sun, the migrants described a mixture of
feelings. While many spoke of anger towards the anti-migrant atmosphere
in Israel and the arrests that accompanied the deportations, others
spoke of relief that the deportation saga is coming to an end and
happiness about finally returning to their homeland, a new country that
did not exist when they fled years earlier.
Andrew Akolawine smiled on the pavement at the bus station, saying
“I’ve been here for five years and I’m happy to be going back. You know
in any circle, you must end at the point where you start. I started
there [South Sudan] and I will finish there, this is enough.”
Akolawine, a father of four, spoke warmly of the Israeli friends he’d
made over his years in the country, but added that recent anti-migrant
statements by Israeli politicians had soured his opinion of Israel.
Still, he cracked, “I’m very proud that I am part of a people Israel
thinks are so important that they don’t talk about the Palestinians
anymore, just us.”
One South Sudanese man facing eviction next week came to bid farewell
to some of his friends, and sounded far more bitter towards the
deportations.
“I need to say to Israel thank you, you don’t want any black people only whites.
When I go back to there, maybe I’ll work in the interior ministry and I will remember well what was done to us.”
He added “I remember growing up reading the Bible thinking Israel is
people who help each other… we ran to Israel and we realized that it’s
not Israel any longer, it’s just like Russia, Iraq, Egypt.”
Orit Marom of the Assaf NGO, which assists African migrants, called
Sunday “a day of shame,” saying that Israel’s Interior Ministry “has
trampled on the honor of great friends of Israel, the South Sudanese.”
Marom added “the South Sudanese, unlike Eli Yishai, have a big heart and
they forgive him.”
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the deportations during
Sunday’s cabinet meeting, saying “today the government will begin the
operation to repatriate illegal work infiltrators to their countries of
origin. We will do this is an orderly and dignified manner.”
Netanyahu also spoke of the government’s efforts to stop the entry of
further illegal migrants by finishing construction of the border fence,
finishing detention facilities for illegal migrants and using
diplomatic steps to find third countries to take in African asylum
seekers.
On June 7, the Jerusalem District Court rejected a petition by human
rights groups opposed to the deportation of South Sudanese, saying the
NGOs did not prove that the South Sudanese would be in physical danger
if they were returned home. Though assurances were made that the
migrants would be given a week to prepare for deportation, three days
later immigration officials began arresting South Sudanese across the
country.
The arrests follow a decision announced in January by the Interior
Ministry, which gave South Sudanese until April 1 to leave Israel
willingly or face deportation.
The Jerusalem Post
source
Comprehensive Peace Agreement [CPA] between the
North and South. The peace process culminated in a referendum in January
2011, when the people of South Sudan voted overwhelmingly to secede
from the North. Despite the CPA, South Sudanese refugees continued to
apply for asylum in Egypt between 2006 and 2010 in more or less the same
numbers as were recorded in earlier years.
This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in Egypt with South Sudanese
female refugees seeking educational, legal and psychosocial services at
St. Andrew’s Refugee Services in downtown Cairo. The information
presented in the paper derives from participant observation, interviews
with single South Sudanese women and NGO service providers between
August 2011 and February 2012.
The author assisted in preparing refugee resettlement referrals to UNHCR
throughout the research period and also undertook an analysis of
relevant media articles, policy documents, internet blogs and literature
produced by UNHCR and the Egyptian government between January 2004 and
February 2012. Pseudonyms are provided for all women discussed in this
work. Institutional Review Board approval from the University of South
Florida was obtained prior to beginning fieldwork. Read more
:
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and the Ethiopian
People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front [EPRDF] have ruled Ethiopia
since 1991. In 1994, the Government of Ethiopia [GOE] became a signatory
to the U.N. Convention on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment and Punishment, incorporated the language of the Convention
into its constitution, and subsequently criminalized all acts of torture
committed in the country. Over the past two decades there has been a
widening gap between law and practice, with numerous reports of torture
of dissidents in conflict zones [the Ogaden area of Somali, and Gambella
regions], and elsewhere in the country. This report is a detailed
analysis of the alleged torture history, and the physical and
psychological findings from forensic examination of 102 asylum seekers
in the United States who presented credible evidence that they were
tortured in Ethiopia. This study is unique because it is the first
comprehensive medical forensic analysis of a cohort of asylum seekers
from Ethiopia, a country whose officials deny that it engages in
torture, and cruel and degrading practices.
This study confirms the growing body of evidence that torture is
widespread, systemic and committed with impunity by GOE officials,
police, and the military to control opposition to the EPRDF. The arrests
and the alleged torture described by our patients were entirely
extrajudicial, with no charges being made, often resulting in long
detentions, and prisoners denied access to counsel and the courts. It is
evident from the statement of the U.N. Committee Against Torture in
2010, that the GOE is in violation of the Convention on Torture,
including article , which requires signatories to take action to prevent
acts of torture. This situation is likely to worsen with the passage of
the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Law, which permits security officers and police
to engage in torture rather than criminalize it, and the Charities and
Societies Law which weakens monitoring of abuses committed in prison. It
is in the United States’ interest to move away from its policy of
“quiet diplomacy” towards Ethiopia, and in concert with its donor
partners, leverage the enormous amount of development aid given to
Ethiopia to force it to uphold and comply with the articles and
principles of the Convention. Read more
