Guinea-Bissau conservationist Ms Augusta Henriques has won a Ramsar Wetland Conservation Award for Management, for her central role in the foundation of NGO Tiniguena (‘This land is ours’) and her long-term leadership and work with communities towards the creation of a Community Marine Protected Area at Urok Islands – the first marine protected area recognised by the Government of Guinea-Bissau.

The Muslim Human Rights Forum has issued a memorandum calling on the Kenya government to petition the government of Uganda to return to Kenya the seven Kenyans held at the Luzira Upper Prison. Arrested in connection with the July 2010 suicide bombings in Kampala, six of the seven men were illegally rendered from Kenya to Uganda with no judicial process.

Maxwell Dlamini, President of the Swaziland National Union of Students (SNUS), has been nominated for the 2013 Student Peace Prize, an award given every other year on behalf of Norwegian students to fellow students around the world who have ‘done important work to promote peace, democracy or human rights.’

We have no stereos
Droning love ballads
To lull us from our reality
The only music we
Know is the wordless symphony
Of the buzzing stars
The bright eye of the night
Candles our hope
We don’t know
Various shades
Of lamps and globes but
We know the colour
Of the moon
The only show
Our eyes can
Afford us is
The flaunt
Of the rising sun &
The display
Of the falling night...

Annette Groth, spokeswoman on human rights for the Left Party in Germany, relates her experience of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which took place from 5 to 7 November in Cape Town, South Africa.