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The Archbishop of Canterbury has urged hunger strikers demonstrating against the treatment of 3,000 Iranian refugees in an Iraqi camp to end their protest. Hunger strikers outside the US embassy in London are demanding the US takes responsibility for Camp Ashraf. Residents of the camp say an Iraqi raid there in July left several people dead. Dr Rowan Williams says the situation at the camp is a humanitarian issue "of real magnitude and urgency", but adds there should be no more loss of life.

A losing presidential candidate in Zimbabwe ’s 2008 presidential elections and now a leading opposition figure Simba Makoni will next Tuesday stand trial on allegations of addressing an illegal meeting during his campaigns.Makoni, a close associate of President Robert Mugabe until he broke away from ZANU PF in February last year to challenge the octogenarian dictator, is being charged under the Public Order and Security Act (POSA).The charges against Makoni who came a distant third in the first round of the presidential vote last year won by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai stemmed from an alleged meeting attended by about 400 people in Harare.

An adviser to President Barack Obama and another U.S. official met with the Dalai Lama at his headquarters in Dharamshala, India, to brief the spiritual leader about the administration’s approach to Tibet. Presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett and Undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero held talks with the Dalai Lama today and yesterday, according to a statement posted on his office’s Web site. The Dalai Lama detailed to Jarrett the issues he wants Obama to take up with the Chinese government when the president visits China in November, according to the statement.

Security forces in Madagascar fired tear gas on Friday to try to disperse hundreds of opposition supporters gathering for a rally in the capital of the Indian Ocean island. Backers of ousted President Marc Ravalomanana massed in a park near a central square, but security forces moved in saying the demonstration had not been authorised.Andry Rajoelina, former mayor of the capital Antananarivo, spearheaded weeks of violent street protests before toppling Ravalomanana in a March coup with the help of dissident soldiers.Raharinaivo Andrianantoandro, spokesperson for Ravalomanana's party, said they had wanted to demonstrate peacefully to condemn Rajoelina's appointment of a new government this week and to convince the ruling authorities to resume crisis talks.

Amnesty International (AI-Ghana) and the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) have kicked against plans by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to forcibly evict more than 40,000 people leaving in a slum of Accra, popularly called 'Sodom and Gomorrah."The slum is a melting pot of various ethnic groups, with majority of them coming from the three northern regions. It has also gained notoriety for violence and crime. A recent bloody clash between supporters of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the National Patriotic Party (NPP) left four people dead.The latest violence sparked another round of plans to evict the residents, but AI-Ghana and COHRE in a petition to President John Evans Atta Mills copied to relevant ministries and agencies say they are deeply concerned about the threatened forced eviction of more than 40,000 residents.

The history of Non Governmental Organisations dates back for not more than four decades in Ethiopia. They were mainly engaged and their primary area of focus was in relief works and service delivery. It is only in the last 10 years or so that Organisations started to actively work on rights issues. Despite the number of limitations and some witnessed malpractices, NGO’s have been doing a commendable work in Ethiopia over the years. Restricted during the Derg regime, there were only few of them allowed to operate under tight government control. Freedom of association was de facto forbidden to independent professional associations, trade unions, the media, academia, the private business sector, and the like as they might be threats to authoritative ruling system. After the fall of the regime however, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia came into being and created conducive working environment for NGOs/CSOs to work under, adopting a constitution which allows for the freedom of association and other related rights after having ratified different international instruments which comprised of different civil, economic, political and cultural rights.

Telling the truth—especially after imbibing one too many—is a sure way to end up in a Cuban jail. That’s exactly what happened to Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos, known by the nickname Panfilo, after he drunkenly burst into a documentary filming and began ranting about Cubans going hungry.Today, a Cuban appeals court upheld the two-year prison sentence Gonzalez Marcos received for “public dangerousness,” rejecting his plea for leniency.When he interrupted the documentary on Cuban music, he began yelling in Spanish, “"What we need here is a little bit of chow!" According to Associated Press reporting, He continued for more than 90 seconds, imploring the camera about how Cubans are going hungry in a country where the communist system is supposed to provide for all citizens' basic needs.

Although the international community has warned that it will not recognise the results of the November elections in Honduras, the de facto government in power since the Jun. 28 coup d'etat says the vote is going ahead.Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, who mediated the unsuccessful talks between ousted President Manuel Zelaya and the coup government, says the elections scheduled for Nov. 29 could be "a solution to the crisis." Others like prominent Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes have expressed similar views.

On May 26 I wrote The Summer of Shove Begins, at a time when pundits and bloggers alike were gnashing teeth over whether US President Barack Obama was overreaching in his now successful agenda to have Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor confirmed by early August and to have a health care bill ready in September.I suggested, as I pretty much always do, that readers ignore the chattering up above and watch the ground game down below and that will decide how the story goes: “the real history will be made, this summer - as during the last two - by the unsung heroes and heroines: the organizers.”

Hundreds of Uighur protesters clashed with Chinese anti-riot police in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang on Tuesday, two days after ethnic unrest left 156 people dead and more than 800 injured. Chinese police have arrested more than 1,400 people following rioting in the restive far western region.Along with Tibet, Xinjiang is one of the most politically sensitive regions in ChinaThe protesters said their family members had been arbitrarily arrested in a crackdown after rioting broke out in the regional capital Urumqi on Sunday, a Reuters reporter said.

China was criticized Saturday over the treatment of three Hong Kong television journalists who claimed they were detained and beaten up while covering protests in the far western city of Urumqi. Hong Kong's Beijing-appointed leader, Donald Tsang, said he was "deeply concerned" at reports about their treatment at the hands of armed police Friday as they covered unrest in the ethnically divided city. Senior Beijing-based reporter for Hong Kong channel TVB Lam Tza-ho and his cameraman Lam Wing-chuan were tied up and held for hours during Friday's riots along with cameraman Lam Chun-wai from Hong Kong's Now cable TV channel.

There are reports of continued violence in China's autonomous Xinjiang region, with police dispersing unruly crowds of the country's predominant Han ethnic group and scattered clashes between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.Han Chinese demonstrators smashed shops thought to be owned by minority Muslim Uyghurs in the regional capital, Urumqi, two days after ethnic unrest in the city that officials blamed on Uyghurs left more than 150 people dead. Police said more than 1,400 had been arrested.

News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country’s Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.China has gone to new lengths to control activity by its huge population of Internet users, like these in Beijing on Saturday. Until recently, users could weigh in on news items on many of the affected sites more anonymously, often without registering at all, though the sites were obligated to screen all posts, and the posts could still be traced via Internet protocol addresses.

The top Communist official in Urumqi in western China was dismissed on Saturday as a large deployment of the military police appeared to have brought a measure of peace to the city after two days of large street protests.Urumqi was the site of huge ethnic protests in early July. Li Zhi, the party secretary of Urumqi, lost his post, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday evening. He became the most senior person to be removed since ethnic tensions erupted there in rioting in July.

Chilean police have arrested some 25 former officials for allegedly helping to purge critics of former ruler General Augusto Pinochet.A judge on Tuesday issued 129 warrants against former members of Chile's secret police agency, Dina. They are accused of taking part in the killings and disappearances of dozens of leftists and opposition activists.

China said a riot that shook the capital of the western Xinjiang region on Sunday killed 140 people and the government called the Uighur ethnic unrest a plot against its power, signalling a security crackdown. Locals took to the streets of the capital, Urumqi, some burning and smashing vehicles and confronting ranks of police and anti-riot troops.A frame grab of a television screen created on July 6, 2009 shows a broadcast by China Central Television (CCTV) in which two bloodstained women are seen on a street in Urumqi, the capital of China's Autonomous Footage also showed a crowd of men pushing over a police car, smashing its windows and throwing stones at it.

In the mid-1990s the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude publicly exposed the use of child domestic help by government officials in order to highlight the widespread problem of child servitude in India. The use of children as laborers continues on a large scale in India, in spite of provisions in the Indian constitution upholding the rights of children and a number of acts that have been passed dealing with child labor. One common type of illegal child labor is as domestic help. Many government officials kept children as domestic help, despite rules forbidding the practice.

People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) worked with a coalition of civic organizations to survey the South Korea population in order to identify criteria meant to eliminate politicians and make them ineligible for election.  Corruption in Korea was so serious that it was the foremost obstacle hindering the progress of Korean society.  Korean political parties have remained unchanged and politicians do not represent the people’s interests. Instead, they exclusively pursue their own interests: power monopolized by politicians only. Although the people have been under severe economic strain since the national financial crisis in 1997, political corruption has not abated.

In June of 1988 hundreds of thousands of Estonians (as many as 300,000 or one-third of the Estonian population by some estimates) gathered for five nights in a row in the capital city of Tallinn to sing forbidden or politically-risky folk songs. Similar song festivals were held that summer in Latvia and Lithuania. This “Singing Revolution,” as it became known, was an important step toward the independence of the Baltic states from the Soviet Union in August 1991.

African Public Radio used its power as a media entity to influence individuals and groups who could help fix the situation in the Burundi’s hospitals, where poor people were being held against their will because they could not pay their bills. Eventually, in partnership with local NGOs, APR successfully pressured the government to order the people’s release.

In war-stricken Burundi, many cannot afford needed medical care. Adding to the problem, a general system breakdown in the 1990s reduced the state’s capacity to support the health system. Facing a budget crisis and growing debt, hospitals began to detain people who could not pay their bills. Because the hospitals felt they were being wronged by those who would not pay, they did not see this as a human rights issue.