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Five Stories You May Have Missed This Week

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Five Stories You May Have Missed This Week

Posted by Clayton Southerly on August 9, 2013

Five Stories You May Have Missed This Week

Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.

Uganda’s crackdown on basic civil rights continued this week when parliament passed a new law requiring citizens to obtain police approval before conducting a politically-themed conversation in public involving more than two individuals. Critics of the bill say it effectively makes it impossible to hold a protest against the government without its prior approval. Amnesty International dubbed the legislation “a serious blow to open political debate.”

Legal red tape is holding up the extradition of four wanted war criminals from Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Following the arrest warrants for M23 leaders Jean-Marie Runiga, Baudouin Ngaruye, Eric Badege and Innocent Zimurinda, Rwandan Foreign Minister Louis Mushikiwabo requested that Kinshasa present additional documentation to complete the applications. Ngaruye and Zimurinda have been sanctioned by the United Nations.

The militaries of Sudan and South Sudan clashed this week in a major oil-producing area. One Sudanese soldier was killed in the incident, the details of which are still contested. This is the latest development in a long-running dispute over oil that saw Sudanese President Bashir threaten to shut down the pipeline that carries all of the South’s oil to the international market.

In Darfur, the Sudanese government refused to renew the work visas for 20 United Nations staff. The aid workers, based in North Darfur, represent over half of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’, or UNHCR, personnel in the region. Both the U.N. and the United States have called on Bashir’s government to re-admit the workers.

Medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders , or MSF is running into bureaucratic inefficiency while trying to provide vaccination services to children in refugee camps in South Sudan. In a video released yesterday, the NGO discusses the vaccination campaign’s challenges in getting these life-saving drugs to those in need and the unwillingness of the pharmaceutical industry to provide the vaccines at an affordable rate for crisis situations.  Watch the video here.