As the HIV epidemic continues to unfold across southern Africa, countries are still struggling to find effective means to address many of its negative impacts at individual, family and community levels. One of the most complicated challenges is how to support the growing number of orphans and other children made vulnerable, or made more vulnerable, by the direct and indirect effects of HIV on their households. In particular, there have been many individual and institutional efforts to assist these children through schools and other educational services and institutions.

As we observe Human Rights Day, we should not forget the silent sufferers—the millions of people with life limiting illness like AIDS or cancer, who quietly live and die in excruciating, untreated pain.

East Africa has emerged in recent years as a focus of both transnational terrorism and Western-backed counterterrorism efforts. Governments have a responsibility to combat terrorism in a lawful manner. But as this report documents, counterterrorism tactics and operations in East Africa have led to a variety of human rights violations. Governments in the region have cited the need to fight terrorism as a pretext to crack down on political opposition, human rights defenders, and lawful expressions of dissent.

This is an opportune moment. The World Bank is currently reviewing its policies related to environmental and social safeguards on investments. That the Bank has until now not taken into account the rights and needs of people with disabilities in these policies is a blatant disregard of basic human rights that must be rectified.

The international community’s attention to Kenya has been sharply focused on the upcoming March 2013 elections and preventing the type of horrific ethnic violence that surrounded the 2007 election. But other things, big things, are afoot.

by Anara Nadirbekova Education Support Program

“To be forgotten is to die a little,” said Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on accepting her Nobel Peace Prize. Her words are an important reminder that strong statements on human rights in one part of the world do not fall on deaf ears in the rest. Not only do prominent dissidents and human rights defenders take heart from political support for their cause, but the message is also heard by ordinary people suffering oppression and indignity.

Launched to coincide with publication of the 2012 UN Office on Drugs and Crime's World Drug Report, this report by Transform, a grantee of the Open Society Foundations, exposes the failure of governments and the UN to assess the extraordinary costs of pursuing a global war on drugs, and calls for UN member states to meaningfully count these costs, and explore all the alternatives After 50 years of the current enforcement-led international drug control system, the "war on drugs" is coming under unparalleled scrutiny.

Over the last decade, the Central Asian republics have hosted a number of international programs designed to overhaul, equip, and reform the region’s border control practices aimed at making the borders more secure and open-more secure against threats such as narcotrafficking and cross-border extremism and more open to licit civilian crossings and lucrative trade flows.