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In cooperation with local activists, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee has submitted an alternative report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women’s (CEDAW) 53 Session on 11 October, where Turkmenistan will be heard in Geneva.

Civil society representatives launching the fifth annual report on the right to food and nutrition state that it is impossible to combat the causes of hunger while keeping existing power relations untouched. The tendency for exclusion from economic and political decision-making goes hand in hand with incidence of hunger and malnutrition.

After nine years of peasant struggle, the Cacahuatepec Accords signed by the Governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre Rivero, and the Council of Ejidos and Communities Opposing La Parota (CECOP) is a major step towards the definitive cancellation of the building of the hydroelectric dam.

Russian Association Golos was awarded the Andrei Sakharov Freedom Award 2012 for its outstanding efforts to promote democratic values through free and fair elections in Russia, Secretary General Bjørn Engesland says in a statement today.

The post-revolutionary Tunisian government has already been accused of clamping down on reporters. The ones recently charged include two artists whose crime is creating sculptures that the authorities consider harmful to public order and good morals. Nadia Jelassi’s work is of a veiled woman surrounded by rocks, suggesting she is being stoned, while Mohamed Ben Slama’s work is of a child with ants streaming from a schoolbag that spell out “God”.

ARTICLE 19 calls on the Ukrainian government to publicly condemn the killing of environmental information activist, Volodymyr Honcharenko, as a crime against freedom of expression and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice via an effective, independent and speedy process. Volodymyr campaigned for environmental information in Ukraine and died in August.

A group of four men attacked the opposition journalist, Ularbek Baytalak, on the outskirts of Astana, where he was left to die. The journalist works for two opposition newspapers, Dat and Tortinshi bilik, and takes a critical stance towards the current government. The attack on Baytalak comes a few months after fellow opposition journalist Lukpan Akhmendyarov survived being shot and stabbed outside his apartment in April 2012.

In August 2001, the Ugandan army forcefully evicted more than 2000 people from their land in the Mubende district to make way for a vast coffee plantation operated by Kaweri Coffee Plantation Ltd., a subsidiary of the Hamburg-based Neumann Kaffee Gruppe. To this day, the evictees continue to suffer from the loss of their land.

Israeli court has ruled in a civil case that the Israel army was not at fault in the bulldozer death of American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie nearly 10 years ago. Corrie was 23 years old when she went to the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip as part of a group of activists of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).