Kenya’s High Court has just delivered a ground breaking judgement on the rights of refugees with implications for hundreds of thousands in Kenya. Affirming the right to freedom of movement and the prima facie right of refugees to live in urban areas, the Court put the right to dignity for refugees back at the heart…
This may be the first time that a former African Head of State is put on trial in Africa. On 8 February 2013, the Extraordinary African Chambers embedded in the Senegalese justice system were inaugurated in order to judge Hissène Habré, the former president of Chad, who ruled from 1982 to 1990. Habré has been…
Being a Rwandan refugee living in the Great Lakes region right now is a dangerous occupation, not least in Uganda where tens of thousands continue to live in exile. They have been, and continue to be, caught up in power games that are being played out across the region and beyond with the government of…
Infrastructural development projects disrupt the lives of thousands of people every year without much attention paid to the human cost. In fact, it is widely believed that up to 80 million people have been displaced by the construction of large dams worldwide. Yet a lot more attention is paid to conflict-induced displacement (albeit with varying…
Jean-Marc is Burundian by nationality. But he has never lived in Burundi. He was born into exile in Rwanda in 1976 where he lived as a refugee until the 1994 genocide when his father was killed and the rest of the family had to flee to Tanzania. Over the course of the next two decades,…
On the occasion of World Refugee Day, the International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) would like to draw the attention of the authorities and Senegalese public opinion to the situation of refugees. Senegal has signed and ratified international and regional conventions relating to the 1951 UN and the 1969 OAU Conventions on refugees. In addition, Senegal…
On Monday May 7, 2013, the Senegalese authorities expelled Makaila Nguébla to Guinea Conakry. He is a Chadian blogger and activist who had lived in Senegal since May 2005. Following a similar incident in which a Gambian opposition member was arrested at the airport and expelled to Mali, this latest development calls into question the…
It is rare for countries to offer citizenship to groups of refugees, especially in the Great Lakes region where millions have been displaced. Instead, most governments wait for circumstances to change so that refugees can go back to their home country. In official refugee policy language, therefore, repatriation is typically favoured over local integration as…
Please note that this blog was previously posted on www.katangatrial.org Four months after being acquitted in the second trial verdict at the International Criminal Court (ICC), Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui is fighting to remain in Europe, having applied for asylum in the Netherlands. His claim is based on his contention that information he presented during his…
Today, 4th March, Kenyans go to the polls to elect a new leader after current President Mwai Kibaki bows out. The elections are being watched with a keen eye across the world, and particularly throughout the region given the wider regional implications of its outcome. But no country in the region will be watching more…
I recently had a call from a young student who is planning to do fieldwork among a group of refugees in East Africa. She had been told by her professor she did not need to obtain official research permission from the relevant government insitution, she had no information about local government structures and protocol, and…
The international community could have avoided the consequences of the crisis in Mali if they had mobilised earlier. And nothing can justify the inaction and slowness of the international and regional military deployment in northern Mali. In January 2012, violence broke out in northern Mali when Tuareg rebels of the National Movement for the Liberation…
Please note that this blog was previously posted on www.katangatrial.org Dear readers – please find below a commentary written by Olivia Bueno at the International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) in consultation with Congolese activists. The views and opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the International Refugee Rights Initiative or…
What happens when you find you have suddenly become a foreigner in the country of your birth? This is exactly what happened to Darfurians last year who were living in South Sudan at the point at which it became the world’s newest state. As Darfur is geographically in the reduced (north) Sudan, technically they were…
In 2011, Africa had an estimated 9.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), more than on any other continent. Forced displacement due to internal conflicts, natural disasters as well as bomb attacks, which are alarmingly on the increase in countries such as Nigeria and Kenya, have all contributed to this number. During a summit held in…
The residents of Tanzania’s Mtabila refugee camp are currently being returned to Burundi against their will. This population, most of whom fled to Tanzania in the 1990s, has been facing increasing pressure to return to Burundi for several years in something of a battle of the wills: on the one side has been the government…
On one of the social networks I subscribe to there was this posting: “Many States in the world have corrupt officials. In Uganda, the corrupt have a State.” Who wouldn’t understand this given the amount of money meant for poor parts of the country that has found its way into private vaults? No wonder those…
Since Guinea gained independence in 1958, the country has been governed by a string of dictatorships. Discrimination along ethnic lines has resulted in massive human rights violations, killings, extrajudicial executions and disappearances. To date, these acts that have been committed by various governments remain unpunished, creating a culture of impunity. The first president of Guinea,…
On 4th November 2012, the new Somali Prime Minister, Abdi Farah Shirdon, announced the composition of his first cabinet with two women appointed as part of the 10 member cabinet. Of particular note, Fowsiyo Yusuf Hajji Aden was appointed as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs while Maryam Kassim was appointed as Minister…
Although it is relatively easy to start a war, it is much harder to sustain it – or at least to sustain it in any effective way. There is an assumption that what distinguishes war from anarchy is that people are fighting for something. Anarchy, on the other hand, is just that: anarchy. While what…
