World Injustice

After 13 years on Zimbabwe's death row, George Manyonga is still waiting to see his lawyer.

He saw him once, briefly, the day before his trial, but since then he has been left on his own.

He has lost his lawyer and now he is losing hope.

"I'm paying a price for something I never committed," Manyonga says.

"If I had a lawyer throughout my trial, the judge would have understood my concerns and acquitted me."

“ The world we live in today, we got soldiers of fortune, people who perform for pay ”
Attorney General Johannes Tomana

Hundreds of women have rallied outside Yemen's parliament to show support for a law banning child marriages.

The law being proposed would set a minimum age for girls to be married at 17 and 18 for boys.

But some conservative Muslims are against the law being passed. The rally comes days after thousands of women protested against it.

The government proposed the law after the marriage of an eight-year-old girl to a 30-year-old man was annulled

The UN chief has said Israel's blockade of Gaza is causing "unacceptable suffering," during a Middle East visit to reinvigorate the peace process.

Ban Ki-moon told Gazans that "we stand with you" as he visited an area damaged by Israel's offensive 14 months ago.

His visit to the region comes amid tension over Israel's plans to build more settlements in East Jerusalem.

Rebuilding is difficult due to a lack of building materials during the three-year blockade.

Switzerland is ready to lift a travel ban on some Libyan citizens in order to ease tensions in a row that has drawn in much of Europe, officials say.

The Swiss government hopes that Libya would reciprocate by ending its ban against travellers from Switzerland and 24 other countries.

In 2009 Switzerland denied entry to nearly 200 prominent Libyans.

Burma's main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), says it will not take part in the country's first polls in two decades.

An NLD spokesman said the party had decided not to register because of "unjust" electoral laws.

The laws recently announced by the junta required the NLD to expel its detained leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, because she has a criminal record.

Its refusal to register means the NLD will no longer be legally recognised.

LAWMAKERS in Senegal have adopted a bill declaring slavery and the slave trade crimes against humanity, moving closer to becoming the first African nation to pass such legislation. “Members of parliament voted on the text on Tuesday,” justice ministry spokesman Cheikh Bamba Niang told Agence France Presse (AFP).

The bill must still be approved by the Senate before being signed into law by President Abdoulaye Wade. The two houses of parliament are largely dominated by the presidential majority. He said the law was about “a duty to remember. It is a judicial response to a historical, distant fact. To show the magnitude and the horror and its dramatic consequences on Africa.”

Ten of thousands of Italians have demonstrated in Rome against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, over what they say are attempts to evade justice.

Mr Berlusconi is on trial in two corruption cases. But legislation being discussed in parliament would in effect stop him going to court.

The protesters accuse the PM of seeking to undermine the legal system.

He says he is the victim of political persecution by the judiciary, which he recently compared to the Taliban.

Nigeria, leading other African countries, and Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) has been accused of blocking the reading of a human rights report on arrest and secret detentions around the world at the 13th session of United Nations Human Rights Council scheduled to hold March 1-30,  2010 in Geneva, Switzerland.

The joint report was carried out by  “the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism,  “the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, “the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and  “the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances on secret detentions.

REJECTING a key demand in a United Nations (UN) report that accused the military of war crimes, Israel has vowed not to set up a special panel to investigate the army's conduct during its Gaza offensive last winter

With a deadline looming, Information Minister Yuli Edelstein, according to the Associated Press (AP) yesterday said Israel would submit a document to the UN later this week that deals only with Israel's own investigations of its wartime conduct.

The UN report has called on Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers to conduct independent probes into the conduct of their forces during last winter's Gaza fighting. The General Assembly endorsed the report last November, giving the sides until February 5 to respond.

An Islamic court in Nigeria has banned a rights group from hosting debates on the Twitter and Facebook websites on the use of amputations as a punishment.

The court, in the northern city of Kaduna, backed a case brought by a pro-Sharia group arguing that the forums would mock the Sharia system.

The rights group, the Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria, said it would appeal against the ruling.

Sharia judges can order amputations of limbs for petty crimes in some states.

But the courts mostly deal with domestic issues such as marriage and divorce.