South African President Thabo Mbeki was to hold talks on Saturday with Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe in Harare before heading on to Lusaka for a summit on Zimbabwe’s post-election crisis, an official said. Mugabe has chosen not to attend the gathering of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community.
Police have banned political rallies and the opposition has accused the authorities of waging a violent crackdown as Zimbabwe’s political crisis deepens nearly two weeks after a presidential election that produced no official winner. Zimbabwe’s neighbours hope to find a resolution on Saturday at an emergency summit in Zambia.
Zimbabwe raised doubts on Friday over whether President Robert Mugabe would attend an emergency regional summit on the weekend to discuss deepening concern over a post-election deadlock in the country. Officials had earlier said Mugabe was expected to attend the Lusaka summit on Saturday of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community.
President Thabo Mbeki is blatantly violating human rights, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) claimed in a document handed to Amnesty International on Friday. The party’s chief whip, Koos van der Merwe, handed a written complaint against Mbeki to a representative of Amnesty International in Pretoria.
Thousands of protesters were expected to line the route of the latest leg of the Olympic torch’s ”Journey of Harmony” on Wednesday as officials in San Francisco braced themselves for a repetition of the tumultuous scenes in Paris and London. A broad coalition of protest groups has converged on the city.
A war of words has erupted ahead of election day in Zimbabwe this Saturday, with the opposition saying the government has already rigged the vote. These elections were ”never meant to be an even playing field”, said Nkosana Moyo, coordinator of presidential hopeful Simba Makoni’s campaign, in Johannesburg on Wednesday.
Poor, rural women bear the brunt of South Africa’s HIV pandemic as they face sexual abuse and discrimination, rights body Amnesty International said on Tuesday, urging government action. A new report said rural women were disproportionately affected by poverty and unemployment and continued to suffer subjugation at the hands of men.
Rioting erupted in a province neighbouring Tibet on Sunday, two days after ugly street protests by Tibetans against Chinese rule in Lhasa that the contested region’s government-in-exile said had killed 80 people. A police officer said that about 200 Tibetan protesters had hurled petrol bombs and burnt down a police station.
British humanitarian agencies on Thursday said the situation in the Gaza Strip was the worst in 40 years and urged the European Union to hold talks with Hamas. ”The situation for 1,5-million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is worse now than at any time since the beginning of the Israeli military occupation in 1967,” the eight NGOs said in a joint report.
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/ 27 February 2008
French President Nicolas Sarkozy travelled to Chad on Wednesday as rights groups urged France not to ”cover up” for President Idriss Déby Itno, accused of having a hand in the disappearance of opposition members. The president will make a brief stopover in Ndjamena en route to South Africa.
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/ 26 February 2008
An Egyptian military court has delayed by a month a verdict on 40 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood who face charges of belonging to a banned group, Brotherhood officials said on Tuesday. Brotherhood lawyer Abdel Moniem Abdel Maqsoud said the court set March 25 as the new date for a verdict for the men.
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/ 26 February 2008
Nigeria’s prisons are a ”national scandal”, filled with thousands of inmates who have never been convicted of any crime while some prisoners wait decades to face trial, Amnesty International said on Tuesday. The human rights group said only about 35% of Nigerian inmates have been convicted in court.
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/ 8 February 2008
Residents of Chad’s curfew-bound capital, Ndjamena, did their best on Friday to resume normal life amid the ruins of a rebel attack and mounting protests over arbitrary arrests and alleged summary executions. The Chadian army said the rebels who were driven back from Ndjamena had withdrawn to Mongo, 400km east of the city.
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/ 7 February 2008
A Russian court refused bail on Wednesday to a jailed oil executive who is gravely ill with HIV/Aids, the latest ruling in a case that has put Russia in breach of an order from the European Court of Human Rights. Vasily Alexanian (36) has said he will die unless he is transferred from his Moscow prison to a specialist hospital.
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/ 4 February 2008
Thousands of civilians fled Chad’s capital Ndjamena on Monday after rebel forces pulled back from a two-day assault, but the rebels said they would attack again to try to topple President Idriss Déby Itno, whose government said it had beaten off more than 2Â 000 insurgents.
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/ 30 January 2008
Kenya on Wednesday pledged tougher action to rein in post-election violence that threatens to spiral out of control, in the East African nation’s darkest moment since independence in 1963. Protests over President Mwai Kibaki’s disputed re-election in the December 27 vote have degenerated into cycles of killing between rival tribes.
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/ 21 January 2008
Libya will make no exceptions in its drive to expel illegal immigrants and any recruitment of foreign labour in future must be done through legal channels, an official said on Sunday. The oil-rich North African country said on Wednesday it had started deporting illegal immigrants, a community of up to two million, mostly men from poor African states.
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/ 16 January 2008
A Moroccan appeals court has upheld prison sentences for six men jailed for ”homosexuality”, lawyer Mohamed Sebbar said on Wednesday. The decision prompted Amnesty International to call for Morocco to decriminalise homosexuality — which carries a maximum three-year sentence.
Deborah Kerr in The King and I recommended whistling a happy tune when afraid, but now Americans can sing along to their favourite tracks while shooting anyone who causes them consternation with a 50Â 000-volt electric charge.
Police raids, arson and tribal attacks over the last 24 hours have claimed more than 100 lives in Kenya, police and officials said on Tuesday, bringing the toll for five days of post-election bloodshed to 299. ”At least 30 have burned to death inside a church in the Kiamba area,” a police commander said.
Brutal unrest across Kenya over President Mwai Kibaki’s re-election left about 150 people dead on Monday — some hacked to death — taking the overall toll to at least 185 killed in four days. Police opened fire on some protesters and looters and many people were killed with machetes as ethnic tensions mounted.
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/ 19 December 2007
The United Nations General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution on Tuesday calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, overcoming protests from a bloc of states that said it undermined their sovereignty. The resolution, which calls for ”a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty,” was passed by a 104 to 54 vote, with 29 abstentions.
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/ 6 December 2007
Iran has hanged a man convicted of raping three boys when he was 13 despite retractions from his accusers and an order for a judicial review of his case. Makwan Mouloudzadeh (20) was put to death on Wednesday in a prison in the western province of Kermanshah.
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/ 3 December 2007
President Vladimir Putin appeared to be heading for a landslide victory in Russia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday night amid widespread reports that millions of citizens were coerced into voting for his party, United Russia. Early results from the Central Election Commission indicated the party was leading with 63% of votes.
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/ 30 November 2007
Courts in Uganda’s war-ravaged north are tacitly condoning rape and other sexual abuses against women and girls, even protecting rapists from prosecution, rights group Amnesty International said on Friday. Sexual abuses against women have become commonplace in northern Uganda during two decades of war.
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/ 19 November 2007
Sudan has formally charged 28 opposition politicians and army officers with plotting to overthrow the government, more than four months after they were arrested, their supporters said on Monday. The 28, including the head of the opposition Umma Party for Reform and Renewal, Mubarak al-Fadil, were taken from their homes at gunpoint in July.
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/ 15 November 2007
Nigerian police have killed 785 suspected armed robbers in the past three months and lost 62 of their own men, the national chief of police was reported as saying on Thursday. Human rights groups and United Nations experts have accused Nigerian police of killing robbery suspects instead of arresting them.
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/ 13 November 2007
The death penalty is a violation of fundamental human rights, and it should be abolished around the world, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday, ahead of a vote on a draft resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for a moratorium on executions.
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/ 1 November 2007
Félicien Kabuga has a reward of several million dollars on his head, and tops the list of fugitives of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Yet, he’s managed to escape justice for years. The ICTR was set up in northern Tanzania by the United Nations in 1995 to bring high-level perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide to justice.
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/ 25 October 2007
Police may have killed hundreds of people in a crackdown on Kenya’s notorious Mungiki gang, a rights group said on Thursday, in a growing national controversy ahead of a presidential election in December. Police are furiously denying the new accusations, calling them an attempt to besmirch authorities.
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/ 25 October 2007
Human rights group Amnesty International accused state security forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo of systematic torture and killings in a report published on Thursday. Amnesty blamed two government security forces — the special services police and the republican guard — for attacks on opponents of President Joseph Kabila.
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/ 23 October 2007
Sudan will announce another ceasefire in its four-and-a-half year conflict with rebel groups in Darfur at the weekend, it emerged on Monday. The announcement will come at the opening of Darfur peace talks, which are to take place in the Libyan city of Sitre.