Rwanda

While in New York to attend the UN summit on HIV/AIDS, Rwandan President Paul Kagame held a number of high-level meetings to discuss the current situation in the Great Lakes region and development support to his country, according to reports from Rwandan presidential spokesman Nicholas Shalita.

Rwanda's speaker of parliament, Vincent Biruta, on Thursday urged the government to place gender-related issues at the "forefront" of all the country's developmental decisions, the Rwanda News Agency (RNA) said. Biruta who was addressing a conference of women parliamentarians from Tanzania, Burundi and South Africa, spelt out the need to have equal participation in development and decision-making in particular.

Amnesty International today appealed to the different armed forces fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire) to halt further killings and other mass human rights abuses against unarmed civilians.

The Rwandan government has violated the basic rights of tens of thousands of people by forcing them to abandon their homes in rural areas and move to makeshift dwellings in government-designated sites, Human Rights Watch has charged in a report.

The Brussels-based think tank, International Crisis Group, on Friday issued a report describing the performance of the ICTR as "lamentable". It said that seven years after its establishment, the ICTR had handed down verdicts on only nine individuals and not one of the alleged masterminds of the 1994 genocide - including Colonel Theoneste Bagosora who has been in prison for five years - had been brought to trial. However, the report said there were some points in the ICTR's favour. "It has pro...read more

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