Egypt should immediately halt deportations of Eritrean asylum seekers to their home country, where they face detention and the risk of torture, Human Rights Watch said today.

The South African government should end its sole reliance on an overburdened asylum system that protects only a tiny fraction of the more than a million Zimbabweans who cannot return to the humanitarian disaster in their home country, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch renewed its call on the South African government to stop deporting Zimbabweans and, in recognition of their protection needs, to grant them temporary status and work rights.

As a rebel leader during the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) war from 1998 to 2003, Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo and his group, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), controlled a large part of northeastern Congo, with support from Uganda.

The Ugandan government should honor its international obligations to rehabilitate child soldiers in the case of Bushobozi Irumba, who was abducted by the Allied Democratic Front (ADF) rebel forces at the age of 9. Arrested at the age of 15, Bushobozi was charged with treason and is due to face a court in Uganda on January 8, 2009.

Human Rights Watch writes to urge the Ugandan government to honor its obligations under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict by ensuring the rehabilitation and reintegration of Bushobozi Irumba, who was abducted at nine years of age by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).

Pirates have put Somalia back on the international agenda, but Somalia's people have yet to receive as much protection as the international tankers off-shore. The brutal, widely ignored conflict in Somalia has crept back into the headlines only after spawning a massive humanitarian crisis and Islamist extremism, as well as piracy. But to deal with these issues, the Obama administration will have to break with failed policies that have helped push Somalia into calamity.

Zimbabwe authorities should immediately release a prominent Zimbabwean human rights activist, Jestina Mukoko, who appeared in a Harare magistrates court on December 24, 2008, on charges that seem politically motivated.

On October 30, 2008, justice for victims of atrocities committed during the course of Liberia's long and brutal years of armed conflict took a major step forward in a very unlikely location: Miami, Florida.