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“The perpetrators of violence, authors of threats and calls for lynch remain undisclosed and unpunished, which gives us the right to say that the government is most frequently the inspirer and the ally, if not the direct executor of the attacks against human rights defenders”, says Srdjan Dizdarevic, president of the Helsinki Committee in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

On October 31st, 2008, leading journalist, Amare Aregawi, was violently attacked in Addis Ababa. Aregawi is the managing editor of The Reporter, a largely circulated newspaper published daily in both Amharic and English.

The 2008 Rafto Prize for Human Rights was awarded to Pastor Bulambo Lembelembe Josué from the Demorcratic Republic of Congo tonight, 2 November, in Bergen, Norway.

The verdict, passed on 23rd September 2008, of 15-year jail term for Trajce Petkovski for raping two 12 year old girls with developmental impairments, caused general discontent of citizens in the Republic of Macedonia. The First Children’s Embassy in the World – Megjashi also expressed their the revolt and displeasure.

Напярэдадні Дня беларуска-літоўскай салідарнасці ў ДПЧ адбудзецца канцэрт-вечарына беларускіх і літоўскіх бардаў.

On the eve of Belarusian-Lithuanian Solidarity Day, JuBIC and HRH are organizing the Solidarity Concert with the participation of the Belarusian and Lithuanian bards.

Morris Odhiambo, the Executive Director of CLARION, says that failure by political leaders to rise to the occasion and make a Special Tribunal a reality, as recommended by Waki, will have the implication of the culprits behind the post-election violence being investigated and possibly prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. He also said that those advocating for amending the Waki report or even for the formation of another investigatory Committee are living in fantasy land, as the involvement of the ICC has been guaranteed by Waki formulation. Odhiambo’s remarks fell on the occasion of the issuing of a press statement yesterday.

The international community should immediately appoint a high-level special envoy and provide additional military support for the UN’s peacekeeping force, MONUC, to stop the violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, said international aid agency Oxfam today.

The Parliament of the Kenyan Coalition Government passed a bill this month to establish a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC). This development was prompted by the widespread violence that followed the disputed Kenyan presidential elections of December 2007, during which over 1,100 people were killed, over 350,000 people were internally displaced and property worth millions of dollars was destroyed, in the country’s worst outbreak of ethnic and partisan conflict since independence.

Daniel Kibrom, a journalist employed by Eritrea’s state-owned Eri TV, has been held since October 2006 in a prison camp in the south of the country, where he is serving a sentence of five years of forced labour for trying to cross the border into Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Reporters Without Borders has learned from a former prison interrogator who fled the country in 2007.

A suicide bomb attack on Wednesday 29th October outside the Ethiopian consulate in Hargeisa, Somaliland, injured three journalists, who were walking before the premises of Ethiopian mission. Journalist Mohamed Harun Ahmed of Somaliland Space Chanel was severely injured as his two legs were broken by the detonation.

In a statement dated 29 October, English PEN voiced its concern on the well-being of dissident poet Sakit Zakhidov, following reports that he was taken out of a prison medical centre prematurely, and was assaulted upon his return to penitentiary #14 in Baku, where he is serving a three-year sentence.