Full Coverage: Civil society

28.02.2006 The ICT Agency of Sri Lanka - ICTA - is seeking interns for the period June - September 2006 to participate in a research effort geared at facilitating the capturing of knowledge as part of its management information program and to provide research material to the support the programs and projects of ICTA .

28.02.2006 A pregnant woman at home alone in her remote village in Sierra Leone unexpectedly went into a difficult labor and, with no access to a doctor or medical facilities, a minor medical emergency could have taken a tragic turn.

28.02.2006 The National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) is part of the National Common Minimum Programme for bringing information and government services to the doorstep of the citizens.

27.02.2006 In this second article about his troubled country, Pradipna Raj Panta turns his attention to the work of international NGOs in Nepal. He is unimpressed by their failure to draw out appropriate skills of local staff.

23.02.2006 The Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, Ljubljana, together with the Slovenian Communication Association, Ljubljana, and Masaryk University, Brno will hold an international conference (Ljubljana, 13-14 October 2006) to discuss how new media development has influenced the terrain for alternative media use in its relation to citizens' empowerment.

23.02.2006 The Civil Society Forum apologized publicly yesterday for the allegations made about SMART and other organizations mentioned in the text “Certain Aspects of Work of National Foundation for Development of Civil Society”, published two weeks ago. The public apology was signed by all members of the CSF, with the exception of the Serb Democratic Forum.

22.02.2006 Jasminka Dzumhur, National Human Rights Officer with UN High Commission for Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2001, works in Sarajevo and shares her time between Sarajevo and Zenica. For years, she had been active in one of the oldest and strongest women NGOs in B&H, Medika from Zenica, and later with the Centre for Legal Assistance for Women, also in Zenica. Human rights, and women human rights in particular, have been her main area of interest for over 11 years.

17.02.2006 Rene Preval won the election, but in a letter to the U.N. special envoy in Haiti, the Haiti Support Group asks about the charges of fraud and vote-rigging that have not yet been addressed. The group calls for a thorough and transparent investigation into the allegations before confidence in the electoral authorities can be resotred.

17.02.2006 Confirming what Amnesty International has repeatedly said, the U.N. issued a report concluding that the U.S. is in violation of the Convention against Torture and must bring detainees to trial or release them. Amnesty maintains that Guantánamo is "just the tip of the iceberg", and calls for other facilities to be opened to independent scrutiny.

17.02.2006 Since 1993 hundreds of young women from Juárez, a large U.S.-Mexico border city, have been abducted and murdered, and Mexican authorities have yet to apprehend those responsible for the crimes. Reporter Carlos Reyes-Manzo traveled to the city to document the images and words of this haunting tragedy.

16.02.2006 Chechen authorities have instituted a ban on all things Danish in the wake of the cartoon controversy. The ban includes the suspension of a refugee relief program run by the Danish Refugee Council and has raised concerns over how the sudden disruption in aid will impact Chechnya's war-affected population.

15.02.2006 Costa Rica is a small Central American country of four million people that - unlike its neighbors El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua during their bloody civil wars - has never attracted much attention in the United States, except as a destination for tourists and retirees. But last Sunday's election there should serve as another wake-up call for Washington.

15.02.2006 Last thursday, 2 February, the “Civil Society Forum” informal initiative that gathers a number of Croatian NGOs, came out with strong accusations against the activities of the National Foundation for Development of Civil Society in 2005. The Foundation is accused of fostering conflict of interests of its governing body members; the inexistence of supervisory or body that would receive complaints; unclear evaluation procedures; unclear financial operations; lack of programming profiling and unjustified expenditures.

14.02.2006 Anwar Kahim Jawad and Vivian Salim Mati, who both lost their families during the Iraq War, were denied visa requests and the opportunity to travel to the U.S. to share their tragic stories and celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8th. Call the State Department or send a message to Condoleezza Rice asking the U.S. to grant them visas, urges Code Pink.

14.02.2006 Today Amnesty International activists will be handing out pamphlets and holding informational sessions in over 40 cities across the country on how to buy diamonds that have not been traded to fund armed conflict or civil war. The guide is also available online and explains how U.S. consumers can help protect human rights and put an end to the trade in conflict diamonds.

13.02.2006 In the face of recent crackdowns on Russian civil society, Amnesty International urges the E.U. to address the Russian Federation’s human rights abuses. Despite not being on the agenda of the G8 meeting that took place in St. Petersburg this weekend, the E.U. cannot ignore Russia's violations under the European human rights framework, says Amnesty.

13.02.2006 We are not cooperative people, and some even accuse us of a crab's mentality — we'd rather bring down the next guy than see the team win. So, when 20,000 volunteers from 700 institutions collaborate to test 332,971 village children in 484 districts at a breakneck pace, within a month that is a victory of sorts. It also says something about our voluntary movement, says columnist Gurcharan Das in The Times of India.

13.02.2006 BRAC University held its first convocation on January 28,2006 with a total of 115 graduating students under various disciplines. The university, which was established by one of Bangladesh's largest NGOs - BRAC - was established in 2001 and has over 2,000 students with two schools and six academic departments, one centre and an institute and a residential campus at Savar.

12.02.2006 The increasing number of the left out youth has begun to acquire threatening proportions before educational planners of the mainstream education in India. A number of alternatives and substitutes has been suggested by the educational planners to check mate the worsening scenario of the dropping out and the left out youth; however none of the alternatives has yet proved to be fully acceptable.

10.02.2006 The European Commission launched a plan to fund development in Africa through the European Investment Bank (EIB ) in an effort to achieve Millennium Development Goals and put the E.U. on “equal footing” with the World Bank. Civil society groups are concerned that the EIB lacks transparency and development expertise, and will contribute little to poverty eradication.