According to Eco-Watch Africa, sexual harassment and violence against women and girls in the aftermath of natural disasters, like recent floods in Mozambique, is an enormous challenge. This means women will suffer both the effects of natural disasters and also the gender-based violence common in refugee camps or post-disaster situations. Yet despite women being the most vulnerable, they are grossly underrepresented in debates, discussions and other decision-making structures around issues of climate change.

COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi warns in a report prepared for the federation's central committee meeting this month that South Africa could become a 'banana republic', and threatens to repudiate President Jacob Zuma's leadership. Cosatu's central committee meeting is a mid-term review since the federation's last congress in 2009. In its analysis, the report compares the ANC's attitude towards the federation to the bad treatment it received during the era of former president Thabo Mbeki. The report confirms that Cosatu believes the ANC Youth League is on a campaign to remove Mantashe and Zuma.

President of the Swaziland National Union of Students, Maxwell Dlamini, has been detained, tortured, and forced by Swaziland’s regime to sign a confession that says he was in possession of explosives during the April 12 Swazi Uprising - a movement inspired by similar uprisings in North Africa and The Middle East. The Free Maxwell Dlamini Campaign, together with the people and organisations that support the campaign - are demanding that Maxwell Dlamini, and his fellow accused Musa Ngubeni, is released unconditionally and that any and all wrongdoings committed by Swaziland’s police forces and security forces towards Maxwell Dlamini and other members of Swaziland’s democratic movement are investigated, and that any perpetrators are brought before a court of law.

In his inaugural speech on 21 May, Côte d'Ivoire President Alassane Outtara called for Ivorians to come together and unite. The text and tone of his speech was conciliatory, observers agreed, and earlier in May he called for the International Criminal Court to investigate human rights abuses on all sides, including those by his own troops. But if his words are to have credibility, observers also agree, his administration must take effective action to halt ethnically-based reprisals that are ongoing, reports the latest edition of the AfricaFocus Bulletin, which contains a summary article and excerpts from the latest Human Rights Watch report, published on 3 June.

For the first time, the role of the internet on the right to freedom of opinion and expression is being reported at the 17th session of the UN Human Rights Council. This signals a clear recognition that the increasing prevalence of the internet in all aspect of our lives is becoming impossible to ignore, and that it is becoming pivotal in the realisation of our fundamental rights and freedoms. At the same session, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women is also presenting her report on violence against women, its causes and consequences. The synchronicity of both reports, especially given the fact that human rights are universal, interdependent and indivisible, calls for a close reading to identify the points of connection that can be built in the effort to recognise, analyse and address violations that affect the recognition, protection and fulfilment of women's human rights.

The International Freedom of Exchange has announced that they are joining forces with other organisations to launch the first ever International Day to End Impunity on 23 November, the anniversary of the single deadliest attack on journalists in recent history: the 2009 Maguindanao massacre in the Philippines. On the heels of this announcement the members learned that Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad had been found murdered in Islamabad, most likely for his reporting on ties between Al Qaeda and Pakistan's navy.

Few cases of sexual assault against journalists have ever been documented, a product of powerful cultural and professional stigmas. But now dozens of journalists are coming forward to say they have been sexually abused in the course of their work. The Committee to Protect Journalists has interviewed more than four dozen journalists who have undergone varying degrees of sexual violence - from rape by multiple attackers to aggressive groping - either in retaliation for their work or during the course of their reporting. They include 27 local journalists, from top editors to beat reporters, working in regions from the Middle East to South Asia, Africa to the Americas.

South Africans mourned the loss of a woman celebrated for her role in the fight against apartheid, and for her nurturing of a new generation of leaders. Crowds singing hymns and songs from the anti-apartheid era gathered hours before Albertina Sisulu's funeral on Saturday, eventually filling about a quarter of a 40,000-seat soccer stadium in Soweto. The service followed a week of national mourning during which flags were flown at half-mast across South Africa and at its foreign missions. Albertina collapsed and died at her Johannesburg home 2 June at the age of 92.

ProBono.Org has a one-year contract position for a qualified lawyer to build on its community advice office ('CAO') project, which aims to support CAOs and community based organisations ('CBOs') by linking them to local lawyers.

The SADC made a fundamental mistake in adopting a strategy of embracing the headlong rush to implement a regional ‘free trade’ regime, argues this article written for the Economic Justice Network. '... all SADC member nations (with the partial exceptions of South Africa and Botswana) remain in various stages of severe societal under-development, largely due to their continued and mostly similar mono-economic (natural resource) foundations, huge socio-economic inequalities, incredibly high levels of poverty and general lack of popular democratic control and participation.'

South African President Jacob Zuma on Sunday launched Africa's biggest free trade bloc aimed at enhancing cooperation between 26 nations to boost economies in the world's poorest and underdeveloped continent. The Southern African Development Community (SADC), East African Community (EAC) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) will now work as a joint bloc.

This special issue will focus explicitly on instances of 'water grabbing', where powerful actors are able to reallocate to their own benefits water resources already used by local communities or feeding aquatic ecosystems on which their livelihoods are based, as well as processes of contestation and resistance. It will in particular focus on how material, discursive, administrative and political power is mobilised to enable such water reallocation and on the impacts of the latter on local livelihoods, rights, gender, class and other social relations.

A coalition of more than 40 civil society groups from 20 countries around the world on 8 June launched a campaign Make Aid Transparent, which calls on governments and other aid donors to publish more and better information about the money they give. At the centre of the campaign, whose members include Transparency International, the anti-corruption organisation, and 18 groups from developing countries, is a petition aimed at donor governments to make their aid more transparent. 'Providing more and better information about aid isn’t hard, and it will help save lives, reduce corruption and waste and deliver lasting positive change in the world’s poorest countries,' the petition reads.

A major pan-African science, technology and innovation (ST&I) survey, aimed at mapping the state of research to help with policymaking, was released on 24 May. The 'Africa Innovation Outlook 2010', prepared by the African Science and Technology Indicators Initiative (ASTII) and launched at its workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, covers 19 countries from across the continent and aims to plug an information gap on the state of science in Africa.

'Eco-label fatigue' is setting in as green logging certification schemes are undermining proper government management of forest resources while 'greenwashing' private ownership of these public resources, critics say. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), created in 1993, is an internationally recognised scheme for the certification of the responsible management of forests. FSC-certified territory in sub-Saharan African countries has more than doubled, from three million ha in April 2008 to 7,6 million ha in Aprril 2011. Yet, African and international civil society organisations are increasingly wary of what some nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) call 'eco-label fatigue', and particularly of the FSC labelling scheme.

The Zanzibar International Film Festival, now in its 14th year and the largest of its kind in East Africa, takes place from 18-26 June. Renowned the world over for putting African film, music, art and design at the forefront of the international scene, main events are in Stone Town, Zanzibar, with some events on Pemba Island and mainland Tanzania. See for more details.

During the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in February 2011, social movements and organisations released a collective appeal against land grabbing. Over 150 organisations have already signed. If your organisation would also like to support this appeal, please do so before 15 June 2011. The Dakar Appeal, together with the names of organisations endorsing it, will be presented during the mobilizations against the G20 Agriculture Ministers' meeting in Paris on 22-23 June. Read and sign the petition here:

Academics, NGOs, policy makers, students and other interested parties are invited to participate at the Doshisha International Conference on Humanitarian Intervention, to be held in Kyoto, Japan from 27-29 June 2011.

At least five people have been killed after police stations were attacked in the northern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, hospital sources say. The BBC's Bilkisu Babangida in the city said there were at least three explosions, while gunfire rang out in what is believed to be the latest attack by the Boko Haram Islamist sect. Its members have killed dozens of police officers and politicians in the city in the past year.

Opposition lawmakers on 6 June abandoned President Museveni in Parliament as he delivered his first post-election State-of-the-Nation address, protesting what they said was his tolerance of graft and corrupt individuals in government. Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, Mr Nandala Mafabi, led from the front as the MPs stormed out of Serena Hotel's Victoria Conference Hall where Parliament had convened. They later denounced what they felt is President Museveni's continued failure to deal with crooked government officials.