19 April 2023 I believe the drafters of the Constitutive Act anticipated scenarios similar to the one obtaining in Sudan, when they coined article 4(h). Africans can not stand by and continue to watch atrocities being committed in Sudan without taking all necessary measures to stop them. Shuvai Nyoni, Executive Director, the African Leadership…
FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR When I was joining IRRI in the first quarter of 2019, I could not have imagined the dynamism and shifts we would experience by the end of 2019. We changed. Simply put. At the milestone of 15 years, we determined that we needed to re- strategise and rethink IRRI, and what…
[Kampala, 20 June 2019]: On the occasion of World Refugee Day, 16 non-governmental organisations call for urgent action to prevent and mitigate the impact of environmental degradation around refugee settlements in Uganda. Uganda currently hosts more than 1.25 million refugees, most of whom rely on natural resources in and around refugee settlements for domestic fuel, construction…
Finally, they are taking place. On 23 December, citizens in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are going to the polls. After more than two years of postponements, it now looks like in January a new president will be sworn in. This might look like the first peaceful transition of power since the country’s…
On 7 August, South Sudan’s president and main opposition leaders signed a new deal, which allows for the inclusion of the latter in the country’s government and is supposed to end the conflict that has ravaged the country since it started in late 2013. Despite hopeful statements by the signatories and its guarantors, this…
In July 2016, serious fighting erupted in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, when a peace agreement signed less than a year before broke down. Many citizens were killed, often in deliberate, ethnically motivated attacks, while others sought safety in the vicinity of the premises of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). Many more…
“They killed my brothers of 16 and 18 years old. They killed them in my presence, I saw it happening,” Sylvia,* a young Congolese mother, told IRRI in Angola. “Even when the military killed my brothers, I wasn’t allowed to cry. They burned the corpses.” A team of experts, mandated by the UN Human Rights…
22 June 2018 To United Nations Security Council Members Re: Proposed reduction to the UNAMID mandate in Darfur Dear Ambassadors, We, the undersigned Sudanese, scholars, human rights organizations and leading activists, write to you to express our concerns with the upcoming proposal regarding the status of UNAMID. In light of frequent and recent devastating incidents of violence,…
The Anglophone crisis has plagued the north western and south western regions of Cameroon for more than a year and seems no closer to resolution. It has reportedly caused the deaths of at least 120 civilians and 43 members of the security forces. Since the end of 2016, and exacerbated since October 2017, the…
On March 30, the UN Security Council renewed the mandate of the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), known under its acronym MONUSCO. In contrast to last year, it was renewed without the threat of budget cuts or any major changes to its complex mandate. The mission maintains its two priorities: addressing the tense…
IRRI’s 2017 Annual Report highlights our work in a year of significant achievement for us, as we continued to work on our three main programmatic areas of: -identifying the violations that cause displacement and exile; -protecting the rights of those who are displaced, and -ensuring resolutions to their displacement are durable, rights respecting, safe and timely. The…
Over sixty people killed, thousands of houses burned down and more than 100,000 displaced people, including 42,000 refugees in neighbouring Uganda. Those are the consequences so far of the violence in the north-eastern Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since December 2017. The violence marks a counterpoint to the general trend in…
Over the last couple of years, scores of activists have died protesting against President Joseph Kabila’s refusal to step down. In the latest bout of nationwide demonstrations on 31 December 2017, at least seven more were killed as they took the streets. Many more were arrested. However, it is not just the Democratic Republic…
International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) a publié un nouveau rapport sur les violences et les déplacements dans la région du Kasaï en république démocratique du Congo (RDC). Il montre que suite à des attaques commises par une milice, ont eu lieu des opérations militaires abusives et des massacres par une milice progouvernement, causant la mort…
International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) published a new report about violence and displacement in the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It describes how attacks by a militia were followed by abusive military operations and mass killings by a pro-government militia, causing the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands. IRRI spoke…
Their priority is not the people of Somalia,” a Somali woman who had recently fled to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya said about peacekeepers in her home country. “It is the government and themselves.” Unfortunately, this view is not unique. Civilians in countries with peace operations often experience a wide gap between them…
Burundian asylum seekers and refugees, International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) said today. According to MONUSCO, on 15 September, Congolese government security forces killed at least 36 and injured over 100 Burundians in Kamanyola (South Kivu province), during demonstrations by Burundians against threatened expulsions. “The Congolese authorities must ensure that their investigation, into what appears to…
(Kampala – 6 September 2017) International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) today published a new report on the African Union and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), exploring how this principle has taken root within the continental union, in the form of non-indifference. The internationally agreed principle of R2P provides that states are primarily responsible for protecting their populations…
Is UNAMID next on the UN peacekeeping chopping block? It seems likely, as years of advocacy by the Government of Sudan and the current US administration’s eagerness to cut UN peacekeeping costs seem to come together. But many civilians continue to rely on the peacekeeping mission’s relative protection, as attacks on civilians continue. Today,…
The United Nations Human Rights Council should urgently establish a commission of inquiry into the situation in the central Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a coalition of 262 Congolese and 9 international nongovernmental organizations said today. The 35th session of the Human Rights Council begins June 6, 2017, in Geneva. Between…
