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The first human rights film festival in Norway that will show the best and most thought-provoking flims about human rights and human wrongs.

Reporters Without Borders and its partner organisation, the Burma Media Association, have obtained a copy of a directive which the military government’s censorship office recently sent to the Burmese media spelling out 10 rules for editors and the sanctions they will incur for not respecting them.

A Tehran appellate court upholds the 11-year prison sentence imposed on journalist Mohammad Sadegh Kabovand for creating a human rights organization in Iran’s Kurdish northwest.

A cross-political parliamentarian delegation from the Norwegian Parliament led by Vice-President, Olav Gunnar Ballo, right (of the Socialist Left Party), will visit Tibet between 10 and 18 November. ”The purpose of the visit is to increase knowledge of the political, economic and social conditions in Tibet” said Mr Olav Gunner Ballo. The delegation aims to have a broad dialogue, including issues related to human rights, during their meetings with local representatives.

The Norwegian Helsinki Committee is organising a nation-wide hearing regarding the Norwegian Roma policy. The hearing will focus on the human rights violations within the Roma community from the 1900s until the present day. It will aim at contributing to a policy that improves the integration of the Roma community in the Norwegian society and further develops the community’s cultural identity.

The Norwegian Helsinki Committee’s advisor Aage Borchgrevink, right, is currently in Tblisi to investigate alleged occurences of war crimes and crimes against humanity during and after the armed conflict in August. According to a statement published in Tblisi last Friday, ethnic cleansing continues in the de-facto border region between Georgia and South Ossetia.

On 4 October, members of the security forces arrested Negin Sheikholeslami, a human rights activist and journalist from the Kurdish minority in Islamic Republic of Iran, at her home in Tehran. Sheikholeslami is at risk of torture and other ill-treatment, says the Human Rights Organization of Kurdistan (HROK).

Hawlati, an independent Kurdish newspaper, recently published articles debating the practice of female circumcision, often referred to as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), in Iraqi-Kurdistan. FGM is a major problem in most of Islamic societies, and the practice has a tremendous cost—many girls bleed to death or die of infection.

Ivar Dale, right, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee’s representative in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, was refused entry to the country when he returned there on Sunday after having attended a seminar in Norway. Bjørn Engesland, Secretary General of the NHC, believes the series of harassments the organisation has been subjected to is politically motivated.