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The European Parliament's Press Service is holding a seminar to provide key media and institutional representatives the opportunity to look into issues of crucial importance to the EU in the coming years, ranging from unemployment and economic stagnation to the refugee crisis and the fight against terrorism. This thematic digest provides selected publications provided by Parliament’s Policy Departments which are relevant to the topic of this seminar.
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

The European Parliament's Press Service is holding a seminar to provide key media and institutional representatives the opportunity to look into issues of crucial importance to the EU in the coming years, ranging from unemployment and economic stagnation to the refugee crisis and the fight against terrorism. This thematic digest provides selected publications provided by Parliament’s Policy Departments which are relevant to the topic of this seminar.
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Une semaine avant l'ouverture de l'exposition «L'art de la paix. Secrets et trésors de la diplomatie» au Petit Palais à Paris -à partir du 19 octobre - le ministre des Affaires étrangères Jean-Marc Ayrault...

The Republican nominee’s rhetoric at the debate was more dictator than leader of the free world.

Thanks to growing implementation of a law passed last year, child marriage may soon be a relic of Malawi’s past, and on the eve of the International Day of the Girl Child, UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson visited the country to celebrate the achievements of UN Women, the Malawian Government, local chiefs and girls who have returned to school after having their marriages annulled.

Au Gabon, on est sans nouvelles de Sylvie Nkoghe-Mbot, médecin, pédiatre et président de l’ONG Hippocrate, depuis le jeudi 6 octobre. Sylvie Nkoghé-Mbot recueille témoignages et constats des violences post-électorales avec photos de blessés et clichés de personnes décédées. Elle est co-rédactrice d'un rapport qui a été remis à Maitre Altit qui instruit un dossier devant la Cour pénale internationale (CPI) pour le compte de Jean Ping. Sylvie Nkoghe-Mbot a été arrêtée, jeudi, à l'hôpital d'Instruction militaire alors qu'elle poursuivait ce travail de constats.

Lausitzer Rundschau: Cottbus (ots) - Ein Beil im Zug bei Würzburg, dann eine amateurhaft zusammengebaute Rucksackbombe in Ansbach, jetzt in Chemnitz professioneller Sprengstoff - die Qualität der terroristischen Bedrohung nimmt zu. Die Gefährdung Deutschlands ist ...

Urging Ethiopian authorities to end their violent crackdown on peaceful protests, which has reportedly led to the death of over 600 people since November 2015, two United Nations human rights experts today further called on the Government to allow an international commission of inquiry to investigate the protests and the violence used against peaceful demonstrators.

Congressional critics of the Saudi-led military campaign against Yemeni rebels are demanding the White House pull its support for Riyadh following an alleged weekend airstrike that killed at least 140 funeral mourners in Sanaa.

Noting the socio-economic progress made by African countries and their centrality in major sustainable development discourses, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called for continued support to the continent, particularly for strengthening good governance and for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Le gouvernement éthiopien a accusé, lundi, des "ennemis extérieurs" d’être à l’origine du mouvement de protestation qui agite le pays depuis plusieurs mois. Un signe de panique du pouvoir face à l'enracinement des mouvements anti-gouvernementaux.

BERLINER MORGENPOST: Berlin (ots) - Die Straßen der Hauptstadt sind Gold wert. Das gilt insbesondere für Unternehmen, die auf diesen Straßen Werbeflächen vermieten dürfen. Offenbar ist die Stadtentwicklungsverwaltung so weit, eine Ausschreibung auf den Weg bringen zu ...

October 10, 2016 (KHARTOUM) - The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the estimates from Sudan's Commission of Refugees (COR) indicate the country has received 100,000 Syrian refugees since 2011.

In its latest weekly bulletin, OCHA pointed out that only 5,515 Syrian refugees have been jointly registered by the COR and UN High Commissioner for by the end of August 2016.

According to OCHA, “UNHCR provides registered Syrian refugees with access to the same services and assistance as other registered refugees living in Khartoum, including targeted financial assistance issued through ATM cards for those who are identified as extremely vulnerable”.

It pointed that main concerns of Syrian refugees pertain to “economic hardship, including accommodation and living costs, lack of access to income-generating opportunities, and lack of access to psychosocial support particularly for children”.
Unofficial estimates say the number of the Syrians in Sudan has exceeded 250,000 refugees.

The current policy of the Sudanese government is to receive all Syrian nationals coming to the country with no visa required for entry. Syrians are granted access to state health and education services.

The majority of refuegees have settled in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum and have become integrated into urban host communities, including an older pre-existing Syrian community.

Last May, the UNHCR provided $ 10 million to the government of Sudan in support to the Syrian refugees.

Badische Zeitung: Freiburg (ots) - Nachdem der Mann der Polizei zunächst entkommen war, hatte mancher schon ein Spottlied auf die Sicherheitsbehörden angestimmt. Dazu gibt es keinen Grund. Das Bild von den ahnungslosen Behörden, die nicht mal wissen, wer sich ...

Qiagen N.V.: Hilden, Deutschland, und Germantown, Maryland (USA) (ots) - Zusammenarbeit mit Hamilton Robotics dient der Entwicklung automatisierter Workflows zur Erstellung genetischer Fingerabdrücke QIAGEN N.V. (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: ...

Interrogé ce lundi sur sa condamnation dans l'affaire des emplois fictifs de la ville de Paris, l'ancien Premier ministre a décoché une flèche acérée contre Nicolas Sarkozy, mis en examen dans l'affaire Bygmalion.

To keep up with Democracy Lab in real time, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Anna Nemtsova reports from Georgia, where a car bomb raised tensions before this weekend’s election. Zia Weise has an update on the strange disappearance of a Kurdish politician in Turkey: Somehow, he’s just turned up in Iraq. Brian Klaas argues ...

October 10, 2016 (JUBA) - A South Sudanese journalist abducted on Friday was severely tortured and dumped near a graveyard, colleagues and relatives said Monday.

State journalists tour Yambio FM, as part of their training (ST)

The incident is the latest attack on the media, following an incident in which a veteran journalist was found dead after being kidnaped by unknown gunmen.

Malek Bol, a journalist with Al-Muogif newspaper, went missing on Friday and was found after being tortured by unidentified group.

He was found at a graveyard in a Juba suburb on Monday morning.

It was not immediately clear as to what prompted government agents to target him.

Colleagues and family members attributed the cause to a critical article he wrote and posted on social media about the performance of the government under President Salva Kiir. The article focused on the economic crisis and corruption in the country.

According to medical reports, the journalist had broken ribs that resulted from severe beatings.

Similar incident also happened earlier this year when two journalists were tortured and dumped on two different graveyards in Juba town.

“It is very unfortunate indeed. We found him in a bad condition, beaten and burned," one of his colleagues at the newspaper told Sudan Tribune on Monday by phone.

The journalist further added that the paper is operating in a difficult situation and was no longer able to balance their stories, only being forced to write and publish a version that suit the interest of the government and allied opposition and views targeting non alliance opposition to the government.

“It is very hard to maintain any level of professional standards these days,” said a reporter who preferred anonymity.

“You know that what happens these days is that security personnel who are deployed to the newspapers ensure that they read all that is going to be published the next day. When they find something which is not in favour of the government, they remove it if they respect you", he added.

(ST)

By Eric Reeves

We are left to wonder—twelve days after Amnesty International's compelling report on the Khartoum regime's devastating assault on the Jebel Marra region of Darfur this year—whether the international community is prepared to move beyond the few brief moments of condemnation that followed release of the report (“Scorched Earth, Poisoned Air: Sudanese Government Forces Ravage Jebel Marra, Darfur,” Amnesty International | 109 pages; released September 29, 2016).

Much of the report was given over to the use of chemical weapons in Khartoum's military offensive, directed overwhelmingly against civilians. Given the massive evidence assembled there can be no reasonable doubting the use of chemical weapons—certainly not in light of the professional analysis by experts in non-conventional weapons and the scores of photographs that reveal destruction of human flesh, internal organs, and illnesses that cannot be accounted for my any known human pathogen. We lack physical evidence in the sense that we don't have soil or bomb fragments samples, or blood samples. But there is simply no other reasonable explanation for what is revealed in these gruesome photographs, or in the remarkably consistent accounts that came from widely separated areas of the Jebel Marra massif.
Moreover, Khartoum's previous use of chemical weapons has been frequently reported by highly reliable sources, including Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (see http://sudanreeves.org/2016/09/29/7469/). We may well conclude that what brief round of condemnation we have heard will exhaust international concern, and reflects how little comprehension there has been of the larger conclusion of the Amnesty report: as a means of crushing the rebellion in Darfur once and for all, the Jebel Marra redoubt of the Sudan Liberation Army/Abdel Wahid (SLA/AW) has been laid waste. Civilians were overwhelmingly the targets of Khartoum's military offensive, and many times more victims died, were wounded, or displaced by conventional weapons than by chemical weapons. The attacks included indiscriminate assaults by military aircraft on civilian villages with no military presence. Looting, village destruction, rape, murder, and a general destruction of civilian life were the primary goals of the offensive—again, typically in areas with no rebel presence. Amnesty estimates that 250,000 civilians were displaced by the violence.

In short, the counter-insurgency in Darfur remains genocidal in character: those targeted in Jebel Marra were overwhelming members of the Fur tribe, non-Arab/African and perceived as the civilian base of support for the SLA/AW. Destruction of civilian life in Jebel Marra, by ethnically-targeting the Fur population as a means of waging war, leaves no room for skepticism about the relevance of the various genocidal acts delineated in Article 2 of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

WILL THERE BE AN INVESTIGATION?

Obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention

Chemical weapons, as hideous as they are, are simply targeting the civilian destruction by other means. They are, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has declared (speaking of chemical weapons use in Syria), a “moral obscenity” (notably, Kerry has offered no similar expression of outrage in the case of Amnesty's crushingly persuasive evidence about what has occurred in Jebel Marra). But the use of such weapons must be investigated—they are banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC—see Article 10); and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has a clear mandate to investigate credible allegations of chemical weapons use. Indeed, the OPCW “Mission Statement” could hardly be clearer:

The mission of the OPCW is to implement the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in order to achieve the OPCW's vision of a world that is free of chemical weapons and of the threat of their use, and in which cooperation in chemistry for peaceful purposes for all is fostered. In doing this, our ultimate aim is to contribute to international security and stability, to general and complete disarmament, and to global economic development.

To this end, the Secretariat proposes policies for the implementation of the CWC to the Member States of the OPCW, and develops and delivers programmes with and for them. These programmes have four broad aims:
to ensure a credible and transparent regime for verifying the destruction of chemical weapons and to prevent their re-emergence, while protecting legitimate national security and proprietary interests;

Member states of the OPCW represent approximately 98 percent of the world's population, and Sudan is a signatory to both the CWC and the OPCW. The United States has an elaborate Web page given over the CWC (http://www.cwc.gov/).

Realistic Assessment of prospects for an investigation

Of course, there will be no investigation of Khartoum's use of chemical weapons in Jebel Marra. The regime will never permit such an investigation, and international acquiescence will again follow such obduracy. Moreover, as the West dithers, the obstacles to investigation grow greater. As Sudan Tribune reports today, Khartoum's génocidaires are now receiving help from the hopelessly ineffective and morally compromised UN/African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID):

Sudan's Foreign Ministry has said that the head of the hybrid peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) Martin Uhomoibhi stressed that his mission didn't receive any piece of information that chemical weapons have been used in Darfur….

In a press statement extended to Sudan Tribune on Sunday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Gharib Allah Khidir said Uhomoibhi told [Foreign Minister Ibrahim] Ghandour that in spite of the almost 20,000 UNAMID personnel on the ground in Darfur, none of them has seen any Darfuri with the impact of the use of chemical weapons as described by Amnesty International's report.

He added the UNAMID chief informed Ghandour that not one displaced person meeting such description has shown up at any UNAMID Team Site clinics where they would have naturally gone for help.

Perhaps we may leave aside the habitual mendacity of Ghandour, given the fact that Nigerian Martin Uhomoibhi has proved as feckless and ineffective as the disingenuous and corrupt previous heads of UNAMID, most notably Rodolphe Adada and Ibrahim Gambari. He is all too likely to have said what Ghandour has attributed to him. Uhomoibhi is simply untrustworthy and has proved himself a tool of Khartoum on too many occasions—nowhere more conspicuously than in these comments.

It should be noted first that it has been years since UNAMID has had any real access to Jebel Marra, in particular to the areas where chemical weapons are reported by Amnesty. It is telling that Uhomoibhi does not explain why his force of 20,000 personnel doesn't gather evidence disconfirming Amnesty's findings. The reason is simple: the Mission can't gain access to the areas specified in Amnesty's report.

As a reporting source, no one seriously engaged in assessing realities in Darfur regards UNAMID reporting as anything but a failing Mission trying to do what it can to disguise that failure. To be sure, we can't know whether UNAMID has indeed failed so miserably as to have heard none of what Amnesty reports on the basis of more than 250 interviews that serve as the evidentiary backbone of its report, along with the searing photographs of chemically ravaged flesh—or whether there is lying or concealment of evidence at some level in whatever passes for a “reporting chain of command” in this deeply demoralized and impotent force. It is difficult to know which of these failings is greater, given the history of UNAMID over the past nine years (as of January 1, 2017).

The international community, then, has a stark choice:

[1] Believe UNAMID chief Uhomoibhi—and Ibrahim Ghandour, who represents a regime that has lied and abrogated treaty obligations on countless occasions, including continuously denying access in Darfur to UNAMID, despite having signed the Status of Forces Agreement of January 2008, which explicitly guarantees unfettered access to the Mission;

[2] Even in accepting that Khartoum will refuse to allow an investigation under the auspices of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, demand that such an investigation be conducted, thereby compelling Khartoum to violate again, and conspicuously, its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The head of the UN's Department of Peacekeeping operations, Hervé Ladsous, has a dismal record on Darfur, but was cited by the UN News Center, several days after the release of the Amnesty report:

Regarding allegations that the Government had used chemical weapons in Jebel Marra, Mr. Ladsous said that the UN had not come across any evidence to support such claims. He pointed out, however, that UNAMID had consistently been denied access to conflict zones in Jebel Marra, and that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had stated, in an initial assessment, that it was not possible to draw any conclusions without further information and evidence being made available. (UN News Centre, October 4, 2016)

In fact, Ladsous seriously misrepresents here what OPCW has said to date; it does not include language supporting Ladsous' claim that OPCW had declared “it was not possible to draw any conclusions without further information and evidence being made available.” Here, in its entirety, is all that OPCW has reported on its website:

OPCW Examining NGO Report on Allegations of Chemical Weapons Use in Sudan

Thursday, 29 September 2016

In response to questions regarding the Amnesty International report, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is aware that Amnesty International issued the report, “Scorched Earth, Poisoned Air: Sudanese Government Forces Ravage Jebel Marra, Darfur,” which includes some allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the Darfur region of Sudan. OPCW shall certainly examine the reports and all other available relevant information.

Such disingenuous construal of the OPCW statement does little to encourage belief that the UN will take any meaningful part in at least forcefully demanding an investigation, even as it is the only way in which Amnesty's conclusions can be confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of physical forensic analysis. In the end, Khartoum's view of things as represented at the UN by the regime's representative, Omer Dahab Fadl Mohamed, will prevail by default:

Sudan's UN Ambassador Omer Dahab Fadl Mohamed responded in a statement calling the Amnesty report “baseless and fabricated” and denying that his country had any chemical weapons. (Associated Press, October 1, 2016 | New York)
It is hardly headline news, but the Parliament of the European Union has demanded an investigation of Khartoum's chemical weapons use; but, conveniently for the countries nominally represented, the Parliament has negligible power or influence within the EU. In another quarter, France, Britain, the UK, and the U.S. have been mooted as possible initiators of a petition for investigation by the OPCW; but every day that passes makes this look less likely. The “moral obscenity” of chemical weapons use, as John Kerry would have it when it was expedient to say as much, is but another obscenity in an unfathomably grim and destructive genocidal counter-insurgency, now very nearly fourteen years in duration.

Eric Reeves has written extensively on Sudan for almost two decades; he is a Senior Fellow at Harvard University's François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights

Silicon Valley wants to explore space as tech entrepreneurs. We should be traveling as pilgrims.