Ivory Coast: 'Gbagbo weapons cache' uncovered

Several generals pledged their allegiance to Alassane Ouattara on Tuesday

French troops have discovered several large arms caches in Ivory Coast that they said would have been used by former Ivorian leader Laurent Gbagbo.

The weapons, stored at villas in the main city of Abidjan, included mortars, cannons and rockets.

Mr Gbagbo is reportedly being held under house arrest in Abidjan.

French forces led an assault against him on Monday to force him from power. He had refused to accept defeat in a November election.

His rival in last year's election, Alassane Ouattara, who was internationally recognised as winning the poll, has now taken power.

During the stand-off between Mr Gbagbo and Mr Ouattara about 1,500 people were killed and a million forced from their homes.

The BBC's Mark Doyle says the French army took journalists to three innocent-looking villas in central Abidjan where they had discovered the weapons.

He says there were enough arms there to launch a new war, more evidence that the dispute over last year's polls were leading the country into chaos.

The French troops documented the arms before handing them over to African UN soldiers for safe disposal.

Earlier, five generals who had remained loyal to Mr Gbagbo pledged allegiance to Mr Ouattara, though there are reports that some soldiers and militiamen have refused to surrender.Risk of reprisals

US President Barack Obama has called Mr Ouattara to congratulate him and offer support as Ivory Coast tries to recover from the recent conflict.

Mr Ouattara's government said Mr Gbagbo had been placed under house arrest, without saying where, AFP news agency reported.

"Pending the opening of a judicial inquiry, Mr Laurent Gbagbo and some of his companions have been placed under house arrest," said Justice Minister Jeannot Ahoussou-Kouadio.

There had been confusion about Mr Gbagbo's whereabouts, with the UN retracting an earlier claim that he had been moved out of Abidjan.

Immediately after his arrest Mr Gbagbo had been taken with his wife Simone to Mr Ouattara's headquarters at Abidjan's Golf Hotel.

Mr Ouattara has promised that Mr Gbagbo will not be harmed, but rather "treated with dignity".

He has appealed for calm, and announced that a truth and reconciliation commission will be set up to "shed light on all the massacres, crimes, and all cases of human rights violation".

Both sides have been accused of atrocities.

Troops loyal to Mr Ouattara also began patrolling the streets of the southern city on Tuesday in an attempt to restore order. Despite their presence, sporadic gun and mortar fire was heard.

International human rights group Amnesty International warned that those seen as supporters of Mr Gbagbo were at risk of violent reprisals, despite Mr Ouattara appeals.

"Today in Abidjan, armed men, some wearing military uniforms, have been conducting house-to-house searches in neighbourhoods where real or perceived supporters of Laurent Gbagbo are living," the group said.

It quoted one witness saying he had seen a policeman belonging to Mr Gbagbo's ethnic group being dragged from his house and shot at point blank range.

Until a 2002 rebellion split the country in two, Ivory Coast - the world's largest cocoa producer - was the most developed economy in West Africa.

source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13058331

EI celebrates International Women' Day

Women around the world continue to face systemic discrimination and inequality in education opportunities and access to decent work.

On International Women’s Day, educators worldwide are demanding greater investments in girls’ education and training opportunities leading to full employment and decent work for women.

The year 2011 marks the centenary of International Women’s Day celebrations. Since 1911, this day has been a global event, celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women in the past, present and future, and mobilising to address the challenges. Around the globe, EI member unions organise rallies, marches, fairs and debates, and reflect on the progress made to advance women’s equality, assess the challenges facing girls and women, look at ways to improve the quality of life and to actualize rights, and to empower girls and women in all spheres of human endeavour.

A strong delegation of trade unionists participated in the 55th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in February 2011. For the first time, gender, education and decent work were included together as priority themes in the UN CSW working agenda.

EI President Susan Hopgood said: “We know that investment in all quality public services is a key driver of development. As such, trade unions have serious concerns with the reduction to budgets that support public services which governments have undertaken in response to the current economic crisis. If Millennium Development (MDG) and Education for All (EFA) goals are to be achieved, the investment in the public sector should be increased, not decreased.”

EI Deputy General Secretary, Jan Eastman, added: “Strategies to improve access to education have been put in place in many countries. These have resulted in increased enrolment numbers for girls, and progress towards gender parity in primary school completion. High drop-out rates are still prevalent, however, and they are higher for girls in a number of developing countries, especially in secondary education, which is key for empowering girls. Drop-out rates are clearly associated with poverty, and also the related phenomenon of child labour. Girls face additional challenges because of the HIV epidemic, work in the home, and also of vulnerable, at risk employment in the entertainment industry or as domestic workers. When education is of sufficient quality, when girls are safe, fed, and pay no fees, parents will send them to school, not to work. Gender inclusive policies aimed at achieving quality primary and secondary education and ensuring universal access are the key to overcoming these development challenges and structural discriminations.”

At EI’s First World Women’s Conference in January 2011 – On the Move for Equality, nearly 400 teacher trade unionists from all corners of the world came together to discuss strategies for advancing and empowering women and girls in today’s world. “Our energies are focused on improving girls’ access to education, eliminating gender stereotypes in education, and fighting for decent work and good working conditions, including pay equity, for women. We are united to make our voice heard – the voice of teachers worldwide for equality and human rights,” said Eastman.

source:http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=1544&theme=gender&country=global

Students from USA visit Aligarh Muslim University

Aligarh : A team of students of Public Health and Human Rights from different universities of United States of America visited Department of Community Medicine, J. N. Medical College, Aligarh Muslim University. The students have come under university exchange programme of India-Health and Human Rights, SIT Study Abroad and World Learning of USA. The team will assess the different levels of health care delivery system in India.

Dr. M. Athar Ansari, Chairman of the Department welcomed the students and team members presented a brief introduction of Department of Community Medicine and its role in the community for the advancement of Public Health especially in urban slums and marginalized population. Students visited different OPD of J. N. Medical College, which is a tertiary care health facility. They observed the functioning as well as resources available in the hospital.

Later, an interactive session was organized in the Committee Room of Dean?s Office. Prof. S. Abrar Hasan, Dean Faculty of Medicine welcomed the students and repied their queries regarding academic activities in the college. Prof. M. Ashraf Malik, Principal and Chief Medical Superintendent, JNMC thanked the students and team members for coming to J. N. Medical College Hospital for assessment of health care and discussed future plan of expansion of activities in the hospital like availability of smart card (Health Insurance) for below poverty line (BPL) patients.

The team also visited Z. A. Dental College and had a brief interactive session with Prof. S. H. Hashmi, Principal, Dental College. The visit to Dental College was organized by Dr. S. S. Ahmad, Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.

Dr. Azim A. Khan Sherwani, Academic Director, World Learning, USA thanked the Dean, Principals and Chairman, Community Medicine for organizing the visit. The team will also visit Malkhan Singh District Hospital (Secondary Care Level) and Primary/Community Health Centre, Jawan, Rural/Urban Health Training Centres, and ROME Mobile Health Clinic of Department of Community Medicine.

source:http://www.indiaeducationdiary.in/ShowUNI.asp?newsid=7984

WSF: Poverty and child labour undermine quality education in Africa

EI and its affiliates have participated in workshops on early childhood education and child labour in western Africa at the World Social Forum which has been held in Dakar, Senegal.

The World Social Forum (WSF) is an international event that draws thousands of people to exchange views on globalisation, human rights and workers’ rights. A special focus in this year’s forum has been African issues, in particular developments in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the lack of action on development and poverty in Africa.

Making their interventions, EI affiliated teacher unionists from SYNESP (Benin); SYNTER (Burkina Faso); BUPL (Denmark); GEW (Germany); GNAT (Ghana); NAGRAT (Ghana);SNEB (Niger), FESEN (Togo), joined members of EI’s Senegalese affiliates and EI’s Africa Region staff to discuss policies to enhance early childhood education, as recommended by the Education for All (EFA) program and the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Participants agreed that unions in western Africa must pursue their efforts to urge governments to take appropriate political measures for quality education. They expressed their concerns about how it could be that countries with limited natural resources, such as Cape Verde, Mauritius and Tunisia, were among the best performers in education, while the richest countries in the region justified their bad performances with budgetary restraints.

Teacher unionists also discussed the high propensity for child labour in the region, and articulated means to fight this practise which was depriving thousands of children from accessing education.

EI’s Africa Region coordinator, Samuel Ngoua Ngou, who took part in the workshops said: “It is not unusual for a child to start working at the age of five. The evidence shows that if a child does not get a basic education, he or she is unlikely to get it later as an adult.”

“There is no doubt that child labour is part of the daily reality in Africa. Despite the legal tools existing to fight it, including governments signing relevant international conventions, the questions is why nothing appears to be happening?”

Ngoua Ngou added that principal factors are the poverty which many families are experiencing, in addition to a lack of political will when the evidence becomes clear that children are not going to school either because there are none in the area, or because the teachers are unqualified.

General Secretary of the ITUC-affiliate CNTS Senegal, and President of ITUC-Africa, Mody Guiro, echoed Ngoua Ngou’s opinion: “It is more than urgent to change the current model of globalisation and put an end to the neo-liberal orthodoxy that has left millions of Africans with under-funded education systems, poor health services and virtually no decent work opportunities. From the WSF in Dakar we call for a new agenda with full employment at its heart.”

The GEW, one of EI’s German affiliates, which is launching a campaign for the eradication of child labour in the cocoa industry, said that it would bring the impact of the issues into classrooms by raising awareness of the conditions under which snack bars, often eaten in schools at lunch time, are produced.

EI applauds its African and German affiliates’ efforts to tackle child labour to reach the MDGs by 2015. It also urges all governments to allocate public funds in the fight against child labour and towards attainment of EFA, while ending the use of the global financial crisis as the short-sighted justification for cutting education budgets.

 

source:http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=1523&theme=educationforall&country=global

'Right to education helping kids' health too'

New Delhi: The Right to Education (RTE) Act, besides giving children between six and 14 years access to free and compulsory education, also helps their health as voluntary groups often target schools for their programmes, experts said on Thursday.

Deworm the World (DTW), a voluntary organization giving deworming medicine against intestinal parasites to children between 6 to 14 years, will soon be covering the capital's government schools and slums.

"After a year-long successful work in seven districts of Andhra Pradesh since 2009, we will now target Bihar and Delhi where our prevalence studies have been going on for quite some time," DTW's executive director Lesley Drake told the sources on her visit to India.

"We realized how effective health plans can be when they are pitched in with educational schemes. RTE is an important catalyst for our policy in India," added Drake. 

The NGO, in its massive action plan, stated that the programme in Bihar will be rolled out in over 67,000 schools of its 38 districts from February to April.

"Deworming is often ignored in developing nations because it does not affect the mortality rate. The need is to realize its impact on the cognitive growth of the child, his education, mental and physical abilities," explained Drake. 

The deworming schemes will also rope in the state governments and additional technical support from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

"In Delhi, our studies across slums and schools are underway, and a school-based deworming programme will be launched in identified at-risk areas later this year," said Prerna Makkar, regional director of DTW's south Asia wing.

"Adequate sanitation, hygienic living conditions, and safe drinking water are other key approaches to the deworming plan," added Makkar. IANS

source:http://indiaedunews.net/Today/'Right_to_education_helping_kids'_health_too'_13460/

IGNOU to train cops in human rights

New Delhi: The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) School of Law (SOL), in collaboration with the National Human RightsCommission (NHRC), has launched an online training programme to sensitize police personnel onhuman rights.

The five-day programme was inaugurated for the police academy personnel of Delhi, Haryana andUttar Pradesh by NHRC Chairperson Justice K.G. Balakrishnan at the IGNOU Convention Centre on February 1.

"This activity is an outcome of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between IGNOU and NHRC a few months ago. The main aim of this programme is to sensitize and spread awareness about human rights. With such a programme,IGNOU aims to bring down the rate of conflicts and crime in the society by creating awareness among police personnel," said IGNOU Vice Chancellor V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai.

While delivering the inaugural address, Justice Balakrishnan said, "It is our basic duty to sensitize people and protect their human rights, and the police play a very important role in the society in maintaining the law and order. NHRC appreciatesIGNOU's efforts in this field. We have launched a basic programme for lower level police personnel in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi andHaryana. The programme is currently available in Hindi and shall be translated into regional languages soon."

Keeping in view the tight schedule of the police personnel, the five-day tailor-made programme aims to equip them with the knowledge of human rights and it can be applied while dealing with the public, said SOL Director Prof K. Elumalai.

The first basic programme was attended by the police personnel in three police academies in Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. They had an online interaction with the chairperson and other members of the commission on human rights related issues.

Giving details about the programme, Prof Elumalai said, "On the first three days, participants will be taught six units through interactive lectures using multimedia tools. On the fourth and fifth day, interactive counseling sessions will be held, wherein all the participants and the programme coordinators will interact through web-conferencing."

"Almost 60 to 80 percent of the police personnel are constables and sub-constables and nearly 80 percent of them are just 10th pass. There is a need to make them aware about all the penal laws in the country, along with the legal knowledge," he added.

NHRC member P.C. Sharma said, "The huge number of complaints against police personnel received in the commission compels us to think about the needful steps to be taken to train them, to make them realize their responsibility towards prevention and detection of crime."

Others present at the event included Sunil Krishna, DG, NHRC; Satyabrat Pal, Member, NHRC; K.S. Money, Secretary General, NHRC; and Prof Uma Kanjilal, Director, School of Social Sciences, IGNOU.

SOURCE:http://indiaedunews.net/Delhi/IGNOU_to_train_cops_in_human_rights_13464/