The Government has spent the equivalent of US $16 million in the fight corruption, the Justice and Constitutional Affairs ministry has said. In a status report released to donor agencies, the ministry cited prosecution of 14 former heads of parastatals as one of the milestones realised in the war against corruption. "Cases being prosecuted included those of directors of Euro Bank, NHIF, NSSF, Postal Corporation of Kenya, Kenya Post Office Savings Bank, and the Pyrethrum Board of Kenya," the statement said.

The Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) invites essays and case studies containing insights into feminist organizational strengthening and movement building. Selected contributions will receive an honorarium of US$1000 to be used in organizational strengthening activities. Selected contributions will also be published by AWID and highlighted at the 10th International AWID Forum on Women's Rights in Development to be held in Bangkok, Thailand on 27-30 October 2005. The call for contributions is available in Arabic, English, French, Russian and Spanish on the website. Deadline for submission is 30 April 2005.

A decade after ratifying and acceding to the famous Beijing Platform of action, women are still viewed as second class citizens throughout much of southern Africa. Gender based violence is still rampant. With the obvious feminization of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, there is an urgent need to critically analyse the current strategies for addressing gender. From April 5-7, 2005, SAfAIDS, the Southern African HIV/AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS) will be hosting a regional Gender Mainstreaming Symposium in Mbabane, Swaziland. The Symposium will bring together over 120 specialists and activists in development, gender, human rights and HIV/AIDS.

The world continued to move closer to the universal abolition of capital punishment during 2004, according to a report on the death penalty worldwide by Amnesty International. In Nigeria, the National Study Group on the Death Penalty, set up by President Olusegun Obasanjo in November 2003 published a report recommending the imposition of a moratorium on all executions until the Nigerian justice system could guarantee fair trials and due process. The Federal Government had not imposed a moratorium by the end of the year. In Malawi, President Bakili Muluzi commuted 79 death sentences and there have been no executions in Malawi since 1992. Lastly, in Senegal the Senegalese parliament passed a law abolishing the death penalty for all crimes. The law was adopted by an overwhelming majority. Senegal had not carried out any executions since 1967 but continued to pass death sentences, most recently in July 2004. It is the fourth West African state to abolish the death penalty, following Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Côte d'Ivoire.

The growing tendency to refuse diversity is generating a new kind of discrimination based on a combination of factors including race, religion, ethnicity and culture, the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Doudou Diène, said in an interview. According to Diène, discrimination exists both in the developed and developing world. In the former it is visible in the increasing rhetoric against migrant and refugee populations and in the latter poverty and conflict were renewing old and negative forms of identity construction.