By api

JUSTICE FOR SALE followed Claudine, a courageous young human rights lawyer, to Congo where impunity is in abundance. She is struggling against injustice and widespread corruption within the justice system in the country.

Her mission was to investigate the case of Masamba, a soldier who has been convicted of rape under unclear circumstances. While there she discovers that his trial was surrounded by circumstances that indicates the man may have been sentenced while not guilty of the offence, but because the system is corrupt and unfair. He was jailed without any concrete evidence. In her journey to seek justice, Claudine uncovers a system full of corruption that enables officials to ignore the laws that should protect all citizens.

This is a very sad story because the investigative lawyer is not getting the people involved in putting the accused in jail. They are hiding something.

 On watching the above video, one understands how corruption kills people. One, if not guilty, is jailed and left to rot in jail for a crime not committed while the real culprits are out there in the free.

The woman who supposedly got raped, when speaking with Human rights lawyer Claudine is easily seen not to have a scar from the incident. Her story is not believable. Someone has used her to get the jailed man out of his job with hidden motives.

Steps to a fair trial: According to “Justice for Sale”

1) From the 5^th till the 25^th of February we return back to the Congo, to visit Masamba in prison.

2) Masamba’s case will be re-investigated by expert lawyers that will meet all parties involved.

3) New  evidence and the contradictions of Masamba’s case will be presented and defended at the High Court in Congo’s Capital Kinshasa by a lawyer mandated for High Court cases.

4) If Masamba’s case is won, legal personnel of the High Court will travel from Kinshasa to the prison in Bukavu to release him.

5) After his release from prison, Masamba will be provided with a small sum of money to build up a new live.

End

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By api

The world is talking, Iran is wining. Iran will soon surprise the world when they test their first nuclear weapon. This is no doubt a scare to the Israelis because Iran has stated, Israel should not exist on earth.

As the talks continue on sanctions after sanctions against Iran, the country is smoothening their final lane to unleash the first nuclear test. The moment they do it, there will be no turning back.

Sanctions will not help stop the nuclear development in the country now. It is late. The world nations – better sit down and talk because already the international community will not be able to stop Iran’s development which is now in the final stage. They can only be stopped if there is a war waged as in the case of Libya, otherwise forget it and leave the Iranians alone – TOO LATE.

After all, many countries talking against Iran have their own nuclear weapons. If those countries with nuclear weapons are keeping them, why do they think the Iranians have a problem to keep theirs? Do they think, may be, the Iranians are childish and will misuse theirs when they finally start launching the testing? Why should other countries deny others to have and yet they have?

When will we have equal nations and respect the integrity of the countries we deal with, instead of threats of sanctions all the time?

End

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by api

Come to the capital of Norway, Oslo – and you will meet many women trafficked into the country roaming the city. It is a shame that a country that likes to pinpoint mistakes in other countries is itself doing nothing to correct the mistakes at home – and one of the mistakes rampant and growing with speed is women trafficking.

Visit the city any day anytime after 21.00 pm and you will meet all sorts of women selling sex in street corners, in bars and even in toilets. They do this because they must because they are trafficked to make money, and the government of Norway is doing little to stop it.

Two years ago, the country’s parliament passed a law prohibiting the buying of sex, but not the selling. What a stupidity! How do you pass a law to prohibit the buying and you leave the sellers to sell? Who will they sell to?

On a closer look and interview with some elderly Norwegian men who actively buy sex almost on a daily basis in bars and toilets, they reveal that the government will not stop the sex trade, because the same government knows that there are many single and divorced men in the country who have money and need sex. The law was, therefore, just to please the international community, but action to stop sex buyers is not a priority.

That is why you find many Norwegian elderly men and some middle-aged roaming the streets and bars at night hunting for sex in exchange for money. They are, by doing so, encouraging women trafficking and the government lets them continue to do so.

Sweden was clever. They passed the law that prohibits selling and buying of sex. This is reasonable and has reduced sex trade in Sweden to 15 percent. The selling and buying still takes place, but hidden in homes not in the streets, bars or toilets like it is happening in Norway.

May be we should not blame the police for doing too little to stop the trade, because the parliamentarians who pass the laws should follow-up by giving the police force enough money in the yearly budget. This kind of crime costs a lot of money if one really wants to stop it. The police have to get enough money for long-term surveillance in order to catch the real culprits, not the simple sellers and buyers on the street corners. But do not tell us it is impossible to stop it – it is possible.

Another way that can help is for the government to contract the job to a private security firm to handle the problem and see whether it will make a difference. It will work well because the private campanies compete with one another and each comapany will want to be considered, and in so doing will work to the satisfaction of the contracting entity in order to get the contract extended in the future.

On the other hand, even if the police got so much money to fight this crime, they do not have to give it priority all the time because they are not competing with any other entities – they are the government.

End

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AFRICA: Reverse migration slowing urbanization rates

Photo: Laura Lopez Gonzalez/PlusNews

Johannesburg is growing, but not as fast as expected

JOHANNESBURG,  – Twenty years ago, South Africa’s cities were braced for a massive influx of rural migrants following the scrapping of apartheid-era pass laws which had restricted black people’s movements. Cities such as Johannesburg and Durban have indeed grown, but not at the phenomenal rates projected and others have hardly grown at all.

With little access to the formal job market, most rural people lack the resources to live in cities for long periods. They often maintain homes and families in rural areas and return there for marriages, burials and when the going gets too tough in town.

According to Deborah Potts, a reader in human geography at King’s College London, similar patterns of circular migration are playing out in many African countries, countering the effects of rural-urban migration and confounding the widely-held assumption that the continent is urbanizing rapidly.

“There are some countries, and it seems to be a smaller and smaller proportion, that are urbanizing in the way that is widely understood,” Potts told IRIN, “but there’s a whole other group of countries, and a much larger group that, based on recent census material, is hardly urbanizing at all; and then there’s yet another group of cities where there has been evidence of de-urbanization.”

In a paper released by the Africa Research Institute in February, Potts notes that high living costs and the lack of formal job opportunities in African cities, particularly following the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, have narrowed the gap between rural and urban living standards.

“Confronted by economic insecurity and other hardships worse than where they came from, people behave as rationally in Africa as anywhere else,” she writes.

Hidden migration

The policy implications of circular or urban-rural migration are significant, but part of the problem of developing policies for a mobile population is counting them. “All of the figures we have are problematic because there’s hidden migration,” commented Prof Phil Harrison, a member of South Africa’s National Planning Commission. “Many households have multiple locations with some members in a rural area and some in informal settlements, and they move between them.”

People are seeking somewhere where they can find a reasonable standard of living and they’re not finding it, so they keep moving

With South Africa’s last census conducted in 2001 and the results from a 2011 census not yet available, Alan Mabin, head of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said that many politicians and city planners were still projecting growth based on old assumptions.

“Many people still think that controlling migration to cities is a good thing, that cities will otherwise be overwhelmed,” he said.

Data from the Independent Electoral Commission, which tracks voter movements, reveals that South Africa’s population is on the move, but not just to cities. “There’s a lot of step-wise migration and movement within municipalities,” said Harrison. “People are drawn to areas of greater economic opportunity, but also where infrastructure and housing is provided.”

Social grants for the elderly, children and the disabled can support a family living in a rural area where the cost of living is relatively low and have even stimulated the growth of cash economies in some areas. The higher fertility rate in rural areas has also compensated for any out-migration.

“In rural areas, we probably have a stable population for the next 20 to 30 years,” said Harrison.

In other parts of Africa which lack the economic safety net provided by government welfare benefits, rural households can often rely on access to land held by local traditional authorities to grow food for their families.

Potts said that countries like Malawi have remained deeply rural, despite the fact that people often struggle to grow enough food for their families, because of the lack of jobs and high cost of living in the cities. “People certainly move to towns, but they don’t tend to stay,” she said. “People are seeking somewhere where they can find a reasonable standard of living and they’re not finding it, so they keep moving.”

Still a magnet

While news that Africans are not flooding into cities may come as a relief to local authorities, Loren Landau, director of the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witswatersrand, warned against complacency. “While the rates of migration may not be as high as some feared, the growth rate when translated into absolute numbers nonetheless represents an important demographic and political challenge to local authorities and others mandated to provide for the urban poor,” he told IRIN.

Cities like Johannesburg remain a magnet for migrants from inside and outside the country and while the expected levels of growth have not happened, the city is still growing at an estimated 1.9 percent per annum, twice the national rate.

“We’ve still got a backlog in terms of addressing needs like housing,” said Harrison. “It might actually be a blessing if growth isn’t as fast as was anticipated.”

ks/cb
source www.irinnews.org

SOUTH AFRICA: Preventative TB trial disappoints

Photo: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

South Africa’s gold-mining industry has the highest TB incidence in the world

JOHANNESBURG,  – After seven years of research, the world’s largest study of preventative tuberculosis (TB) therapy has found that untargeted, community-wide distribution of TB prevention drugs did not improve TB control on South African gold mines.

Conducted among 27,000 gold-mine employees in 15 mines, the Thibela TB study tested the theory that treating an entire community with the first-line TB drug isoniazid could result in long-lasting reductions in active TB cases and TB prevalence.

Workers in eight mines were offered TB screening. Those with active TB were treated, while those without active TB – about 24,000 – were given a nine-month course of isoniazid preventative TB therapy (IPT). Workers in the remaining seven mines were screened and treated according to national guidelines whereby only high-risk individuals with HIV or silicosis would have been eligible for a six-month IPT course.

But according to results released on 8 March at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle, Washington, the community-wide IPT provision did not reduce TB incidence or prevalence within communities.

In people who do not have active TB, IPT applies one of the two drugs commonly used in combination to treat active TB as a preventative measure. While many people carry TB, only about 10 percent will ever develop it. However, those with compromised immune systems, such as people living with HIV or silicosis – a lung-destroying respiratory illness often contracted by miners exposed to silica dust – are much more likely to develop active TB.

Gavin Churchyard, the study’s principal investigator and chief executive officer of South Africa’s Aurum Institute for Health, said that while Thibela showed poor results at community level, it did underscore IPT’s proven effectiveness in preventing active TB among individuals who were on the drug course but this protection waned quickly once patients stopped taking IPT.

He added that the long-running trial also revealed important insights on how to better conduct future large-scale, cluster randomized control studies and that these techniques were helping to shape studies evaluating the effects of newly introduced TB diagnostics such as GeneXpert. 

Researchers are now recommending that governments such as South Africa’s continue targeted IPT provision aimed at high-risk groups. However, Churchyard added that focused rollouts remain difficult when people did not know they were “high-risk”, ie HIV-positive or suffering from silicosis.

Poor working and living conditions, coupled with high rates of silicosis, have fuelled TB on the mines for years, aggravated by the advent of HIV. The South African Department of Health, in its TB Strategic Plan for South Africa 2007-2011, has estimated that the country’s gold-mining industry has the highest TB incidence in the world.

Silicosis is estimated to affect a third of all South African gold miners and autopsies have shown that many miners remain undiagnosed and untreated, particularly black mine workers who traditionally assumed the most dangerous jobs in the mines under apartheid.

With an HIV prevalence of about 18 percent, South Africa has had national IPT guidelines in place since 2002 but eight years later the coverage was estimated to be below 1 percent. Last year, 320,000 people were put on the preventative therapy, according to Churchyard.

Next steps

Thibela is the second large-scale, community-focused TB prevention trial to report disappointing results in the past six months. In October 2011, the ZAMSTAR study conducted among almost 963,000 people in Zambia and South Africa found that enhanced, community-based TB case finding also had no effect on incidence or prevalence. Both Thibela and ZAMSTAR are part of the Bill and Melinda Gates-funded Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic.

Thibela and ZAMSTAR researchers are evaluating data that Churchyard said they hoped would tell them why both studies failed to lower new and existing cases of TB at the community level. Thibela researchers will report the findings of these models at the bi-annual South African TB Conference in June 2012.

“The reasons we’re exploring are, broadly, that we didn’t achieve adequate IPT coverage, or there is a high rate of ongoing TB transmission in the mines, or miners’ vulnerability due to HIV and high silica dust exposure undermines IPT’s protective effect at the community level,” Churchyard told IRIN/PlusNews. “It’s likely that all three contributed to the fact that it didn’t work.

“We can’t stop here, we have to seek solutions to control TB in the mines.”

Thibela investigators will also present their findings at an April 2012 ministerial meeting of the Southern African Development Community. The meeting in Luanda, Angola, is expected to bring together ministries of health, finance and labour and industry representatives, to discuss TB in the mining sector. The meeting is expected to produce a SADC declaration on the issue by August 2012 and a regional plan of action to inform future TB interventions.

llg/kn/mw

source www.irinnews.org

ZIMBABWE: Doubts over door-to-door testing campaign

Photo: Obinna Anyadike/IRIN

Will door-to-door testing be effective?

HARARE,  – Zimbabwe’s ambitious plan to offer an HIV test to every household in the country is not yet under way but is already being met with scepticism by activists who feel this is not a priority for the country, especially with global HIV/AIDS funding on the decline.

Owen Mugurungi, national coordinator of the HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis Unit, told IRIN/PlusNews the government wanted every sexually active Zimbabwean to know their status by 2015 by bringing HIV testing closer to the people. “We have not secured additional funds for this initiative but I think that with the little available resources from the AIDS Levy we can start with a pilot in a few districts. Lessons learnt from the pilot programme will be used in the phased rollout of the programme,” he said.

The AIDS levy - a 3 percent tax on income – has become a promising source of funding for the country in recent years – an estimated US$20.5 million was collected in 2010; with most of the money being used to purchase antiretroviral (ARV) medication.

“Prevention, prevention and prevention is the only way we can control the epidemic; that is why HIV testing and counselling are critical,” he added.

HIV prevalence in Zimbabwe has declined remarkably in recent years, dropping from 26 percent to 14 percent between 1997 and 2009; however, at 13 percent now, it remains one of the highest in the world.

Tinashe Mundawarara, programme manager for the HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Law Project at the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, warns of the possibility of compromising on informed consent and confidentiality when testing is done on a large scale.

“When properly done, door-to-door testing has its advantages, for example, reaching out to people who ordinarily face challenges in accessing Voluntary Counselling and Testing,” said Mundawarara. “When this is not properly done, there are high chances of ostracism, violence, stigma and abuse in the home because disclosure will take new dimensions that are not anticipated given the complex scenario of the home environment.”

Door-to-door testing was successfully piloted in Bushenyi District, in western Uganda, between January 2005 and February 2007, reaching 63 percent of all households. A study of the impact of the programme found that the benefits of home counselling and testing were far-reaching.

But in 2008 Human Rights Watch and the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA) jointly conducted research on Lesotho’s “Know Your Status” door-to-door testing campaign, which planned to offer 1.3 million people an HIV test within two years. The report found that many counsellors were ill-equipped to conduct HIV counselling and testing, and the counselling they provided was often substandard, raising concern about whether people’s consent to test — or their decision not to test — was actually informed.

Funding questions

In addition, the household testing campaign would require a lot of funding. “The challenge here is whether to use resources for identifying new HIV-positive clients for information or statistical purposes or to use the same resources to provide treatment for those already identified who need treatment now,” Mundawarara said.

Activists have also raised concerns about whether the testing campaign will go beyond merely testing people, and whether it will motivate them to change their sexual behaviours and also refer those testing positive to treatment facilities.

At least 1.2 million people are estimated to be living with HIV in Zimbabwe. Of these 347,000 are accessing treatment through the state-run programme, while another 600,000 urgently need ARVs. With limited money to scale up the provision of ARVs, the healthcare system would not have the capacity to treat those testing positive during the campaign, activists have cautioned.

Read more

KENYA: The downside of door-to-door testing

SOUTHERN AFRICA: Door-to-door outreach cuts TB prevalence

KENYA: Testing from door to door

According to AIDS activist Tendayi Westerhof, the time for such campaigns has long passed, and the government should be focusing on using the little resources available to strengthen its treatment programme and consolidate prevention strategies such as male circumcision and condom distribution.

“It makes economic sense that the little resources available must be focused on the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission and ARVs for people living with HIV who are in urgent need of treatment. Zimbabwe is among the 23 countries that are implementing the Global Plan towards the elimination of new HIV infections among children by 2015 and keeping their mothers alive.”

But Mugurungi insists government is focused on universal access to HIV prevention and treatment in line with the Millennium Development Goals and commitments of the UN High-Level Meeting on AIDS of June 2011.

“It would be narrow-minded to focus on treatment while leaving out prevention. After all, HIV testing and counselling is an entry point to HIV care and treatment, support and mitigation, so those who are advocating for more funds for treatment should be reminded that if people don’t know their status they will not access treatment and people will continue to present late for treatment and might die, yet drugs are available and stockpiled,” said Mugurungi.

st/kn/mw

source www.irinnews.org