By api,

According the Kenya media “The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has requested an arrest warrant for Sudan’s defence minister for alleged crimes in Darfur.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo has told the media Mr Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein is of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The crimes were committed in 2003-2004.

The request to the ICC was made by Moreno-Ocampo’s office this morning.

According to the statement issued by Moreno Ocampo Hussein is said to be among those who ar considered responsible for atrocities in Darfur. At the time of crimes he was also the country’s minister for interior.

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by api

SECURITY: Mixed report on mine action progress

Landmine clearance and donor support for mine action reached an all-time high in 2010, but more countries – four – deployed antipersonnel mines than in any year since 2004, according to NGOs.

In addition, Kasia Derlicka, director of the 90-plus country network, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, said money for survivors was still insufficient.

Photo: Wendy Bruere/IRIN

A deminer with Handicap International demonstrates how to remove a landmine manually in Casamance, Senegal

“The movement has come a long way over the past 20 years in stigmatizing landmine use and creating an international mine ban norm, even among non-signatories… but the way ahead is still long.”

She spoke to IRIN from the ongoing Meeting of States Parties in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to assess progress on wiping out cluster munitions and anti-personnel mines.

From contamination to clearance, highlights from the meeting and the Landmine Monitor 2011 report include:

• A total of 159 governments – 80 percent of the world’s nations – have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. Finland is the newest signatory as of 28 November. Thirty-seven states, including China and the United States, have not joined.
• Landmine action attracted record monies in 2010 – US$637 million – but the percentage allocated to survivor assistance has stagnated over the past decade at 9 percent;
• Annual total clearance of mined areas reached a record high in 2010 – at least 200sqkm – resulting in the destruction of more than 388,000 anti-personnel mines and over 27,000 anti-vehicle mines, mostly in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Croatia, Iraq and Sri Lanka;
• Israel, Libya and Myanmar have laid antipersonnel mines thus far in 2011. Syria laid new mines along the Lebanese border in October 2011, after the Landmine Monitor 2011 report went to print. None of these countries has joined the treaty;
• Non-state armed groups in Afghanistan, Colombia, Myanmar and Pakistan laid new mines in 2010 – down from six countries in 2009;
• Requests for landmine clearance deadline extensions “have become the norm rather than an exception”, the report says. Requests must be submitted to a committee of members of the Mine Ban Treaty before the annual meeting. Twenty-seven countries – half of the most affected member states – have thus far requested extensions. None have been denied;
• Eighty-seven states have completely destroyed their landmine stockpiles, including Iraq as of June 2011. Belarus, Greece, Turkey and Ukraine failed to meet the four-year deadline in 2010 to destroy their stockpiles as set by the Mine Ban Treaty;
• Myanmar addressed the meeting for the first time as an observer on 29 November, saying landmine use deserved “careful consideration” , while defending the country’s right to mine;
• A total of 4,191 new casualties – 75 percent civilian – was recorded in 2010, a 5 percent increase from 2009. Half the reported casualties occurred in the Asia-Pacific region, with Afghanistan being the most mine-affected country worldwide;
• More attention has been given to survivors’ access to health and rehabilitation services, but such improvements were partly offset in places where armed conflict made it more difficult for survivors to access those services.

sh/pt/mw source http://www.irinnews.org

By api

The Chief Justice Dr Willy Mutunga is not happy with the government, saying the judiciary should be left alone to do its job as per the constitution.

The quarrel between the Judiciary hots up after a High Court Judge issued an order to arrest the Sudanese President Mr Al Bashir should he ever step on Kenyan soil.

The president is wanted by the International Criminal Court to face serious charges on crimes against humanity in connection with Darfur killings.

After the order was issued by the High Court in Nairobi, as requested by the Kenya Chapter of the International Jurists, Sudan reacted by ordering the Kenyan ambassador to leave their country and at the same time recalling their own.

The Chief Justice is angered by the fact that the government has started a diplomatic campaign to have the arrest warrant withdrawn. He has told the politicians to desist from jumpy-jumpy mouthing with unnecessary comments against the arrest warrant.

The Foreign affairs minister Mr Moses Watengula has been despatched by President Kibaki to Khartoum to cool down President Al Bashir’s temper, before he does more damage to Kenya by – “most probably”  - chasing all the Kenyans out of his country..

But at home in Kenya, the Chief Justice says, those who are not happy with the court’s decision may appeal, but do so following the law without any form of intimidation.

Related article:

• The Kenya government will not obey the Judge’s order to arrest Al Bashir, the Sudanese wanted by ICC
• Angered by Kenyan judge’s arrest order: Sudan’s Al Bashir wants to break diplomatic relations – Expels Kenyan Ambassador

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foreign affairs minister, al bashir, sudanese president,international criminal court, and president kibaki

by api

Photo: Guy Oliver/IRIN

Zimbabwean asylum seekers in the border town of Musina line up for pre-registration

JOHANNESBURG, – Nearly half a million asylum seekers in South Africa may lose their right to earn a living or study while their refugee status is being determined after indications that the government plans to amend legislation governing those rights.

An announcement on 23 November that Cabinet is “reviewing” the minimum rights of immigrants, including the right to work and study, was followed by a media briefing two days later at which Mkuseli Apleni, Director General of the Department of Home Affairs, suggested that the asylum seeker system was being abused.

“The right [of asylum seekers] to work and study has created a problem,” he said. “People by default are going through the asylum seeker process in order to be able to work, but the majority are economic migrants using a back door.”

Apleni noted that South Africa has the largest number of asylum seeker applications in the world. The system needed “streamlining”, he said, and an amendment to current legislation would likely be passed in the next legislative year.

Refugee rights groups have reacted to the announcement with alarm. A joint statement by several civil society groups, including the Zimbabwe Exiles Forum, and People Against Suffering, Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP), argues that the review is a precursor to the withdrawal of rights that will “force more asylum seekers underground, thus making them liable to exploitation”.

“It’s going to limit people’s employment opportunities, deny children living here a right to education, [and] increase tensions with locals,” predicted PASSOP director Braam Hanekom.

South Africa’s 1998 Refugees Act is silent on the question of whether someone who has been issued an asylum seeker permit can work or study while awaiting a decision on their refugee status. An attempt by Home Affairs to expressly prohibit work and study was challenged when a case was brought to court in 2003 by the Cape Town-based Legal Resources Centre (LRC) on behalf of a Zimbabwean woman and her disabled son.

All these things are part of a pattern and it’s the wrong way of going about things – it’s unconstitutional and it doesn’t comply with our refugees act

The matter went to the Supreme Court of Appeals, where the judge ruled that freedom to work and study were “an important component of human dignity”, and guaranteed by the country’s Bill of Rights.

“The judgement was a resounding endorsement of asylum seekers’ right to work, and they’re obviously trying to override that,” said William Kerfoot, the LRC attorney who handled the case.

Asylum seekers, who are not eligible for any kind of social support, often wait years for their applications to be processed, and prohibiting them from working “effectively turned them into criminals or beggars”, he commented.

More than half of asylum seeker applications in South Africa are made by Zimbabweans fleeing economic hardship and human rights violations. Very few of them are eventually recognized as refugees, but applying for asylum is often their only legal avenue for remaining in the country.

The resulting flood of applications has created a backlog in the asylum system that the Department of Home Affairs attempted to address in 2009 by introducing a special dispensation to lift the threat of deportation from undocumented Zimbabwean migrants.

In the latter half of 2010, Zimbabwean migrants were given the opportunity to apply for work and study permits, and those already in possession of asylum seeker permits were encouraged to trade them in. Only about 275,000 of the up to 1.5 million Zimbabweans that the International Organization for Migration estimates are living in South Africa participated in thedocumentation process and many are still waiting for their permits to be issued.

Home Affairs recently resumed the arrest and deportation of undocumented Zimbabweans, and according to news reports about 4,000 have been deported via South Africa’s Beitbridge border post to Zimbabwe since early October 2011.

“[The government] has been trying to do something about the asylum system for a long time, but the rhetoric is all about stopping economic migrants from coming in,” said Roni Amit, a researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg.

“It is true that there are people who are economic migrants who are applying for asylum because they have no other option. If they provide an alternative system that would be an improvement, but they seem to be more concerned about people who are abusing the system than people who are in need of protection and aren’t getting it,” she said.

Apleni did not provide details of any planned alternative system, but suggested that the amendments would help deal with the backlog and ensure genuine asylum seeker applications were processed more quickly.

“South Africans must feel safe,” he told journalists at the media briefing. “If we’re not able to control our illegal immigration, people won’t feel safe.”

Kerfoot interpreted the latest government announcement as further evidence of “an overall harsher regime towards asylum seekers”. He pointed to recent amendments to the Immigration Act reducing the time asylum seekers have to report to a refugee reception office after entering the country, as well as the closure of two of seven such offices, one in Johannesburg and another in the city of Port Elizabeth on the south coast.

“All these things are part of the same pattern and it’s the wrong way of going about things – it’s unconstitutional and it doesn’t comply with our refugees act,” he told IRIN.

The statement from PASSOP and other refugee rights groups expresses similar concerns about “what now appears a campaign against asylum seekers”.

ks/he source http://www.irinnews.or
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by api

Photo: Guy Oliver/IRIN

Regional efforts are underway to help countries prepare better for extreme weather events

DURBAN,  - Extreme weather events in the decade ending in 2010 claimed more than 710,000 lives and cost countries and people more than US$2.3 trillion as defined by purchasing power parity (PPP), says the Long-term Climate Risk Index for 1991-2010.

PPP is a currency exchange rate that compares the actual value of things in countries – for example, a farmer in India can buy more with US$1 than a farmer in the US.

The index, released on the sidelines of the UN climate change talks in Durban and produced by Germanwatch, a North-South watchdog initiative, looked at the impact of extreme weather events from 1991 to 2010, based on data from Munich Re, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies.

Bangladesh, Myanmar and Honduras top the long-term index. However, there is some good news for Bangladesh – everyone’s disaster poster child. More than 80 percent of the deaths in Bangladesh in the last decade occurred in 1991, when over 140,000 people were killed by a cyclone, but not as many have died since.

That subsequent extreme events have not caused as much hardship is an indicator that “it is possible to better prepare for climate risks and prevent larger-scale impacts from disasters”, the authors noted.

The index also looked at 2010 separately and placed Pakistan – affected by severe flooding in that year – at the top, followed by Guatemala and Colombia.

“We have had floods again this year and we are not really prepared for extreme events of the scale we saw in 2010,” said Farrukh Iqbal Khan from Pakistan, a lead negotiator at the Durban talks.

Sven Harmeling, an adaptation expert and author of the index, said the mounting costs of dealing with disasters made a case for the operationalization of the “loss and damage” work programme in Durban.

We have had floods again this year and we are not really prepared for extreme events of the scale we saw in 2010

The decision to set up such a programme to understand the financial exposure of countries to the impact of climate change, and explore ways to avoid and reduce loss and damage, was taken at the last round of formal talks in Cancun, Mexico, in 2010.

A report prepared by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat has highlighted what the programme should do, Harmeling said.

It has to identify the gaps in information to assess the different types of risk, loss and damage at various levels, and assess current practices and lessons learnt in doing that. Harmeling said he hoped that a clear work plan would emerge out of Durban to do this.

There are regional efforts underway to help countries prepare better for extreme weather events. The South African Weather Service (SAWS) announced that it was geared to helping Southern African Development Community (SADC) member countries by providing an early warning system to predict severe and extreme weather events in a collaborative project.

The Severe Weather Forecasting Demonstration Project got much impetus in 2007, when the SAWS was able to give Mozambique five days of lead time to prepare and evacuate people out of harm’s way after its warning of Cyclone Favio.

“We are still working on it but we intend to build the technical capacity of the weather offices in all the countries, besides providing them with essential data,” said Lawrence Dube, manager of the climate section at SAWS.

As happens every year, the first two days of the UN climate change talks were marked by the release of alarming weather data to set the tone of the conference.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced on Tuesday (the second day) that global temperatures in 2011 so far are the 10th highest on record; and higher than any previous year in a La Nina event, which has a relatively cooling influence.

WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud said in a statement: “Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere… are rapidly approaching levels consistent with a 2 to 2.4 degrees Celsius rise [by the turn of the century] in average global temperatures, which scientists believe could trigger far reaching and irreversible changes in our earth, biosphere and oceans.”

jk/he source http://www.irinnews.org