The Changing Nature of Conflicts is putting a new strain on Human Rights
Posted: 31 January, 2025 Filed under: Michael Aboneka | Tags: abduction, adequate nutrition, Boko Haram, conflict, Convention on the Rights of the Children, DRC, education, Ethiopia, forced displacement, gross human rights violations, Israel-Hezbollah, livelihood, property, right to food, sexual violence, Somalia, Starvation, starvation tactic, Sudan, violence against children 2 Comments
Author: Michael Aboneka
Advocate of the Courts of Judicature of Uganda
There is a new shift from the conventional war of state-to-state confrontations to new forms of conflict with no clear boundaries between military and civilian spheres.[1] According to the Alert 2024 Report, 2023 recorded 36 armed conflicts the highest ever since 2014 with new cases in Ethiopia, Somalia, DRC, Sudan and Israel-Hezbollah.[2] This article explores how these new forms of conflicts have increased starvation, forced displacement and violence against children, in the face of increasing rise of non-state actors involved in conflict.
Forced marriage is a major concern for mental health of victims: Why are partners not doing enough? A case of Somalia
Posted: 15 August, 2023 Filed under: Bahja Hassan | Tags: CFM, child marriage, child mothering, economic gain, escaping poverty, forced marriage, fundamental rights of girls, gender equality, Girls Not Brides, health risks, Laws and policies, legal frameworks, mental health, mental healthcare, mental healthcare services, negative implications, ocial-cultural underpinning, political instability, poverty alleviation, right to education, rights to dignity, Somalia Leave a comment
Author: Bahja Hassan
Independent Somali Gender Analyst
Summary
This article points out why initiatives to address child and forced marriages in Somalia are inadequate at providing mental health services to survivors of child marriages. It proposes an urgent rethinking of current interventions and approaches to integrate mental healthcare services so that frontline workers are equipped with necessary skills to provide services to young mothers. It argues that failure to integrate mental healthcare services into programmes aimed at ending child and forced marriage would not provide any meaningful results. This is because child and forced marriage inevitably impact girls’ mental health so much as it violates their rights to dignity, education, and livelihoods.
Respecting the rights of urban refugees in East Africa through a human rights approach to urbanisation
Posted: 7 September, 2015 Filed under: Gertrude Mafoa Quan, Michael Addaney | Tags: 1951 Convention, assault, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), discrimination, East Africa, Eritrea, Ethiopia, hostility, human rights, Kenya, nited Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, poverty, Refugee Consortium of Kenya, refugees, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, sustainable development, Tanzania, Uganda, UN Habit, UNHCR, United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, urban development, urban refugees, urbanisation 4 Comments
Author: Michael Addaney
Student (MPhil Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa), Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria
Author: Gertrude Mafoa Quan
Candidate Attorney; LLM (Multidisciplinary Human Rights) student at the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria
The city is the new refugee camp…
~ International Rescue Committee
Article 1 of the 1951 United Nations (UN) Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (1951 Convention) defines refugee as ‘a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence due to a well-founded fear of persecution base on race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion and is unable or unwilling to avail him or herself of the protection of that country or to return there for fear of persecution’. Due to contextual issues, article 1 of the 1969 Organisation for African Unity’s Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa (1969 OAU Convention) added a second paragraph to the 1951 Convention to incorporate people that have been displaced due to liberation wars and internal upheavals.
Meanwhile, there is no internationally recognised definition for urban refugees. However, the Refugee Consortium of Kenya (RCK) defines an urban refugee as a refugee who satisfies the international requirements for obtaining a refugee status and has self-settled in a city or town. Recent decades have experienced rapid population growth with most cities witnessing urban sprawl. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported in 2009 that an estimated 58 percent of the world’s 10.5 million refugees now reside in cities.
Despite it being mostly rural region, UN Habit has projected that Sub-Saharan Africa and for that matter countries in Eastern Africa will have more than half of its population residing in urban areas by 2026. Characteristically, there has been increasing flow of refugees to urban areas in this region too. According to official UNHCR 2015 statistics, four Eastern African countries (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia) host more than 1.5 million refugees. These refugees are mostly from 9 countries (Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo).
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Call for an African Union resolution on the use of drones in Africa
Posted: 5 August, 2013 Filed under: Benjamin Ng’aru | Tags: Africa, African Charter, African Union, Al-Qaeda, Ben Emmerson QC, CIA, CIA's angry birds, constitutive act, Djibouti, drone strikes, Ethiopia, extra-judicial killings, Glomar response, human rights, Human Rights Watch, humanitarian law, International Court of Justice, international human rights, international law, right to fair trial, right to life, right to privacy, Seychelles, Somalia, UN Special Rapporteur on Counter Terrorism and Human Rights, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions, United States of America, unmanned aerial vehicles 4 Comments
Author: Benjamin Ng’aru
Legal Assistant, Local Authorities Pensions Trust; Volunteer Programmes Assistant, Legal Exchange Centre, Nairobi, Kenya
On 15 March 2013 Chief Judge Merrick Garland of the United States (US) Court of Appeals Circuit in American Civil Liberties Union Foundation v Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) dismissed the CIA’s standard Glomar response to its expanded and clandestine programme to carry out targeted killings on suspected terrorist. Barely two months later, a High Court in Peshawar, Pakistan, held that drone strikes (and their continued use) “are a blatant violation of Basic Human Rights and are against the [United Nations] (UN) Charter, the UN General Assembly Resolution …and a violation of the sovereignty [of Pakistan]”. Whereas not fully specific on the human rights instruments violated, these judicial pronouncements point to an increasing dissatisfaction by the international community on the lack of a concise and regulated use of the “CIA’s angry birds”.
This note seeks to merely highlight possible violations of various rights including the right to life, right to fair trial as well as the right to privacy, which are all enshrined in the African Charter; and call upon the African Union (AU), through its various organs, to promote more transparency on the use of drones and foster the enactment of a continental regulatory framework to govern the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by western nations on African soil.
The use of drones in African’s airspace has been on a steep rise. The latest documented incident was on 27 May 2013 when Al-Shabaab allegedly shot down a UAS Camcopter S-100 near the town of Buulo Mareer, southern Somalia. The London based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that over 200 persons, mostly non-combatants, have been killed by drone strikes in Somalia since 2003. American drone support bases have been reportedly set up in Arba Minch (Ethiopia), Seychelles, Camp Lemonnier (Djibouti) and recently in Somali’s shell-crated international airport in Mogadishu. A 2012 study by Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law indicated that there were more civilians and innocent residents killed in the drone strikes than militants throughout the period of the drone program.
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