She is the ex-wife of the president of South Africa Zuma. She was supported strongly by her ex-husband’s government and she won by getting 37 votes, forcing the former AU boss Dr. Ping to step down.

The new leader says she will be inclusive. She has been praised for having done well in her country as Foreign minister and until her election Interior minister.

End

Photo: Kristy Siegfried/IRIN

Migrant casualties are mounting as smugglers take greater risks to evade authorities

JOHANNESBURG,  – When Abdo Giro*, a 55-year-old evangelist minister and political dissident from southern Ethiopia, paid smugglers 55,000 birr (US$3,095) to take him from the Kenyan border town of Moyale to Johannesburg in South Africa, he was completely unprepared for the ordeal that lay ahead.

“It was totally different from what they promised me,” he told IRIN, speaking through a translator.

Instead of the promised “nice car”, he was lucky to end up in a packed mini-bus for the first leg of the journey through Kenya and Tanzania. The other half of his group of 76 fellow Ethiopians were hidden in a load of wood in the back of a pick-up truck. The two vehicles took rough back roads and travelled mainly at night to avoid detection. When they encountered police, a bribe was paid and they were allowed to continue.

Before they reached the border with Malawi, Giro’s smugglers unloaded the migrants in an area of bush and left them there for five days without food or water while they checked the route ahead.

“We shared the little water we had and ate leaves,” recalled Giro. “Many of us got sick from the heat and malaria; four people died while we were there.”

While Giro was hiding in the bush, another group of Ethiopian migrants using a different smuggler were attempting to cross Lake Malawi. When their overloaded boat capsized, 47 of the migrants drowned.

A week later, while Giro was struggling to breathe in the back of a packed truck travelling through Mozambique, 42 Ethiopian migrants suffocated to death in another truck travelling through central Tanzania. The driver dumped the dead bodies on the side of the road along with 85 survivors and drove on.

There were no deaths in the vehicle that Giro was travelling in, but 16 of his group who were travelling in the vehicle loaded with wood died during the journey.

“I sometimes don’t sleep thinking about [them],” he said. “There should be more laws to punish such inhumane individuals.”

Hidden trade

The scale of the two tragedies in Malawi and Tanzania has thrown a spotlight on the thriving and largely hidden human smuggling trade between the Horn of Africa and South Africa, but they are unlikely to act as a deterrent for Ethiopians and Somalis wanting to escape conflict, political oppression, drought and endemic poverty, who view South Africa as a land of relative prosperity and freedom.

“For most Africans, South Africa is like the closest thing to Europe or America and it’s easier to get to,” explained a member of the Ethiopian Diaspora Development Association in Johannesburg who declined to be named. “Many of them already have relatives here.”

Smugglers are capitalizing on the demand for their services and the relative impunity with which they operate by making increasing financial demands on desperate migrants while showing little regard for their safety.

When borders and policies become more restrictive the unpleasant truth is that migration doesn’t stop, it merely adapts

During the last leg of the journey, Giro’s smugglers demanded an additional US$2,400, citing the costs of bribes and food, despite having fed their charges nothing but stale bread and water. The migrants were instructed to call their friends and relatives in South Africa and tell them to have the money ready. After arriving in Johannesburg Giro was kept at a house in the suburb of Mayfair for another two days while his four cousins, who work as informal traders, scraped together the cash to secure his release.

“It will be very tough to pay them back,” sighed Giro who owes his relatives another R2,000 ($244) for the bribe they paid a Home Affairs Department official to secure him a one-month asylum seekers permit that is now about to expire.

Border officials get tough

South Africa has taken steps in the past year to reduce the numbers of asylum seekers flocking to the country. Border officials now routinely turn away would-be asylum seekers who have transited through other countries based on the principle that they should have sought asylum in the first safe country they reached.

Christopher Horwood, coordinator of the Nairobi-based Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat, argues that such measures do little to curb the activities of smugglers, but increase the risks for their clients.

“When borders and policies become more restrictive the unpleasant truth is that migration doesn’t stop, it merely adapts. [It] makes smugglers more desperate to evade police and thereby take further risks with the men and women in their boats, in their containers and misnamed `safe-houses’,” he said.

Last year, police in northern Mozambique responded to the large numbers of Ethiopian and Somali migrants arriving on smugglers’ boats from Mombasa by intercepting the migrants and dumping them on the border with Tanzania where they spent several months in jail before being repatriated.

Smuggler networks appear to have responded by simply changing their routes. Following the drownings in Lake Malawi in mid-June, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) released a statement noting that the numbers of migrants and asylum seekers arriving in Mozambique has decreased since last year while UNHCR’s country representative in Malawi, Caroline van Buren, told IRIN that there has been a notable increase in Horn migrants transiting through Malawi in the last three months. Groups of migrants are usually intercepted near the border with Tanzania in Karonga District and detained by police until UNHCR can send a team to determine those eligible for asylum who can be transferred to Dzaleka refugee camp.

“Our budget has been depleted in the first few months of the year because there are so many of these groups that have to be screened,” said van Buren. “If these are genuine asylum seekers they’d be allowed in [at the border], but because there are smugglers involved they take a route across the lake or through the bush.”

A “low risk” business

Three Malawians are facing charges of manslaughter in connection with the migrants who drowned in Lake Malawi, but convictions for smuggling are rare, according to Horwood. Countries like Tanzania still lack specific laws criminalizing human smuggling, while local law enforcement authorities are often complicit in accepting bribes from smugglers in return for turning a blind eye or even facilitating their activities.

“The business of smuggling and trafficking is one of high rewards and very low risks,” Horwood told IRIN. “The prosecution and conviction rates related to aggravated smuggling and trafficking are dismal in Africa.”

More often than not, he added, it is the migrants themselves who face rough treatment and imprisonment when intercepted by authorities. According to the International Organization for Migration, about 1,300 irregular migrants, most of them from Ethiopia and Somalia, were being detained in Tanzania as of March this year while a Kenyan newspaper recently reported that 190 Ethiopian nationals were doing jail time in Isiolo, a town in Kenya’s Eastern Province that is a stop off on the smuggling route from Moyale.

Faced with the debt he owes to his cousins and unsure how he will afford the necessary bribes to renew his asylum seeker permit, let alone secure refugee status, Giro said he now regrets taking so many risks to come to South Africa.

“I’m trying to warn others in Ethiopia not to come, not to believe the smugglers,” he said.

*Not his real name

ks/cb
source www.irinnews.org

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CAIRO,  – A decision by the Egyptian Health Ministry to peg local medicine prices to international ones is causing concern. “This is a catastrophic decision,” Karima Al Hefnawy, a member of local NGO the Independent Right to Health Committee, told IRIN. “Egypt is a low-income country, which means that linking local medicine prices with international ones will cause suffering to the poor.”
 
Only about 30 percent of Egyptians have health insurance, according to a recent estimate by the NGO. Hitherto, medicine prices were set by the ministry, sometimes at much lower prices than the manufacturing cost, leading some suppliers to go out of business.
 
Another local NGO, The Medical Association, says of the US$10 billion spent on health last year, only about a third came from the government. The government has allocated $4 billion, or 4.8 percent of Egypt’s total budget in fiscal year 2012-2013, to the health sector. This, experts say, means that individuals will continue to foot most of the health bill in the new fiscal year.
 
Chairman of the Health Ministry’s medicine sector Mohsen Abdelaleem rejected the concerns, saying the higher prices would allow more pharmaceutical companies to stay in business, making medicines more widely available.
 
ae/kb/cb
source www.irinnews.org

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Photo: Martha Ann Overland/IRIN

Only 39 percent of the people who need ARV treatment receive it

BANGKOK,  – Pressure on developing countries to adopt clauses affecting intellectual property rights could limit access to generic antiretroviral (ARV) drugs in Asia and the Pacific, experts and activists warn.

“We are very concerned about the sustainable future of HIV treatment programmes,” Steven Kraus, director of the United Nations Joint HIV/AIDS Programme (UNAIDS) in Asia and the Pacific region, told IRIN. “Countries must use all the means at their disposal, including the TRIPS [Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights] flexibilities, to ensure sustainability and the significant scale-up of HIV services to reach people most in need.”

Member states of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are required to comply with TRIPS agreements but are allowed important flexibilities, including compulsory licensing and parallel imports in manufacturing and procuring generic versions of patented medicines. Countries must incorporate these flexibilities into their national legislation. Members categorized as Least Developed Countries (LDC) are exempt from TRIPS agreement until 2016, with the possibility of further extension.

However, bilateral and regional Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Economic Partnership Agreements could contain clauses that undermine the TRIPS flexibilities, such as extending the life of patents beyond 20 years.

These clauses, generally known as TRIPS-plus provisions, could affect public health in Asia and the Pacific regions, UNAIDS and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) warned in a joint brief. “To retain the benefits of TRIPS Agreement flexibilities, countries… should avoid entering into FTAs that contain TRIPS-plus obligations that can impact on… [the] price or availability [of pharmaceuticals],” the UNAIDS/UNDP brief noted.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and UNAIDS Progress report for 2011 puts the number of people receiving ARV therapy in Asia and the Pacific at 980,000 – almost triple the number of HIV-positive people being treated in 2006.

Despite this progress, only 39 percent of the people who need ARV treatment receive it, and statistics vary widely across the region, partly because of cost. Cambodia has an estimated 92 percent treatment coverage, Thailand has 67 percent, Malaysia 36 percent and the Philippines 51 percent, according to the report.

In Myanmar the situation remains dire. Of the 240,000 people thought to be infected with HIV, only 24 percent have access to ARVs and are in the more advanced stages of HIV/AIDS, said the international health NGO, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

We are very concerned about the sustainable future of HIV treatment programmes. Countries must use all the means at their disposal, including the TRIPS flexibilities, to ensure … the significant scale-up of HIV services

“Only about one-third of people [in Asia and the Pacific] in need have access to treatment,” said Kraus of UNAIDS, warning that in the current economic climate sustaining even that in the long term will be a challenge.

Among the FTAs under negotiation, including the agreement on data exclusivity between the European Union (EU) and India, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement (TPP) is of particular concern. TPP is a multilateral trade agreement among nine countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei Darussalam, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, and the United States. Activists worry that TPP will threaten access to generic medicines and are urging those countries still negotiating, such as Malaysia and Vietnam, not to join.

“TPP is a free trade agreement that goes far beyond what the WTO requires. It could impact access to second- and third-line ARVs, with devastating effects on people’s lives,” said Paul Cawthorne, an access to medicines campaign coordinator at MSF in Bangkok. “TPP could also impact access to first-line ARVs and block people from receiving life-saving treatment.”

However, a statement by the Office of the United States Trade Representative on 10 July noted that the proposals on intellectual property rights were still being negotiated, and the TPP agreement would boost trade and investment among partner countries, bringing economic growth and development, and addressing key issues such as worker rights and the environment.

The issue of access to affordable medicines and the TRIPS-plus provisions is expected to feature high on the agenda of the 19th International AIDS Conference in Washington on 22 July.

fm/ds/he source www.irinnews.org

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