Aiming to achieve the collecting and sharing of timely, reliable and accurate information during a crisis to improve humanitarian response, this report outlines a synthesis of the accomplishments, discussed key themes and identified current and future challenges from the Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange.

Main issues discussed include the uses and users of humanitarian information, the importance of standards and appropriate use of technology and the need for partnerships at all levels and better response from decision-makers and donors.

Aiming to examine the models and identify successful approaches in humanitarian information management, this article takes stock of ReliefWeb's accomplishments, discusses lessons learned and identifies the challenges that will drive the site's ongoing development. For this purpose, it looks at the following issues:  

- ReliefWeb today
- Success factors
- Meeting the challenge

Launched in June 1996, ReliefWeb was established to provide timely and reliable information during crises in order to improve response, maximise resources and minimise human suffering.

This toolkit aims to assist field-based actors to effectively co-ordinate, assess, plan, implement, monitor and evaluate quality food, health and nutrition programmes in refugee situations.

For this purpose, it offers UNHCR checklists, formats, guidance materials and other reporting forms to assist programme management and co-ordination.

Its main target audience are all technical actors involved in health, food and nutrition programmes, UNHCR Senior Managers and Programme Officers, and other humanitarian actors working in the areas of Education, Community Services and Protection.

This annual report for the year 2001 considers humanitarian crises worldwide. In addition to examining key events and new instruments for speedy intervention in sudden onset crises, its special feature discusses the ICRC's orthopaedic project in Afghanistan. Other features include:

- Accounts: Afghanistan, Angola, Chechnya, India
- Crises: Western Saharan Refugee in Algeria
- ECHO: Partnerships, policy aspects, prevention and preparedness, training and studies
- Global overview

This report examines the extent to which international rules for the protection of human rights create binding legal obligations on companies. Detailed and well-developed international human rights standards cover many areas. However, most of these rules were drafted in order to regulate the behaviour of states. To what extent do they create legal obligations on private actors like companies? Are the existing rules adequate or are new international rules needed?

Protests by Georgian refugees against the Russian-led peacekeeping force in Abkhazia are causing new tensions
By Irakli Chikhladze in Tbilisi (CRS No. 114, 1-Feb-02)

A wave of protests by refugees on Georgia's border with Abkhazia is raising the temperature in the long-running dispute over the breakaway Black Sea region.

Hundreds of Georgians displaced from Abkhazia, joined by students and army veterans, have blocked the bridge over the River Inguri, the only route into the separatist province from Georgia.

They are demanding that the Russian-led

NAIROBI, 1 February (IRIN) - A recent survey by the aid agency International Rescue Committee has shown widespread reluctance among residents of Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, to relocate outside the volcano stricken town, despite the danger of further eruptions in the region.
The committee reported that 43 percent of the people polled were unwilling to relocate to Mugunga, one of the sites proposed by the Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie that controls much of eastern part of the country.

Eighty-six percent said they were unwilling

By Spc. Brent M. Williams, 49th Public Affairs Detachment (Airborne)

Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan - A bar, 3.5 meters wide, rotates 72 chain hammers, beating the earth for mines, the remnants of more than 20 years of war in Afghanistan. A pillar of dust churns from underneath the chain-flail as the desert-colored minesweeper digs tracks in the fields. Engineers from the Jordanian Army are using this mechanical chain-flail minesweeper to clear Bagram airfield and the surrounding area of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. The Jordanian military