Chechnya: Humanitarian situation improves but challenges remain, UN says
The humanitarian situation in the Russian republic of Chechnya has “improved significantly” but “serious challenges remain, including security and human rights abuses”, the UN has said in a statement based on a report by its refugee agency.
AKI – Adnkronos International, September 7, 2007

APEC region human security needs to be enhanced: ministers
Human security should be enhanced to ensure sustained economic growth, higher living standards and reduction of poverty in the Asia-Pacific region, APEC ministers said Thursday.
People’s Daily Online/Xinhua, September 6, 2007

Flood-borne disease hits nearly 1000 in east Sudan
Nearly 1,000 people have had acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) spread by flood waters in eastern Sudan, and 58 of them have died, a World Health Organisation (WHO) official said on Wednesday. “The total number of cases is now almost 1,000. Fifty-eight have died,” the official, Ahmed al-Ganainy, told Reuters.
Reuters, September 5, 2007

Nepal: Traffickers exploit increased mobility of underage girls
Sixteen-year-old Sushma does not want to reveal her true identity for fear that the traffickers who sold her into the notorious brothel area of Kamathipura in Mumbai, India, could track her down and kill her. “I should have listened to my village schoolteacher who told me not to be taken in by false promises of a job abroad,” she told IRIN, expressing regret that she had left her village in Banke, nearly 600km southwest of Kathmandu, without even informing her parents.
IRIN/Plus News, September 4, 2007

Climate change – not just a green issue
“Climate change poses a serious, ongoing threat to human development and human security. The outlook for many of the least development countries, especially those in Africa, under a business as usual model is bleak, even though these same countries have some of the lowest per capita emissions of greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming. The likely impact of climate change thus presents a global ethical challenge as well as a development and scientific challenge.”
Dr Charles Reed in a Mission and Public Affairs Briefing Paper from the Church of England, August 2007

CERI Program for Peace and Human Security
The CERI Program for Peace and Human Security is a new thematic centre whose mission is to engage in academic and practical work in the field of peace studies and human security. The Centre acknowledges that peace today can no longer be defined as the simple absence of war and security can no longer be defined simply in terms of regional stability and territorial security of nation states. A feature of this site is an extensive online library covering peace and human security issues. The site also lists courses and conferences, publications and research undertaken by the Centre as well as links to other sites.
www.peacecenter.sciences-po.fr

State of Despair
Earlier this year, Dateline’s Olivia Rousset travelled to Jordan to investigate the living conditions of Iraqi refugees. Up to 700,000 Iraqis fled to neighbouring Jordan, and the mass exodus has been described as the biggest refugee crisis to hit the Middle East in 60 years, as two million Iraqis flee their homeland. Rousset finds Iraqis living in squalor, with hardly enough food to eat, no school for their children to go to, emotionally and mentally scarred, some still nursing physical wounds from their ordeal. Worse still are the Palestinians who fled Iraq once Saddam Hussein was toppled. They live in a refugee camp on the border with Jordan, a bleak place in the middle of the desert where summer is scorching and winter is freezing.
Dateline SBS TV, Wednesdays 8:30 pm - Repeated Thursday 2:30 pm & Monday 3:30 pm

“… building a compassionate society is not a technocratic exercise. It requires solid ethical and moral foundations. It requires entirely a new way of thinking of ourselves as a human family, not just a collection of nation states. It requires a new concept of human security which is founded on human dignity, not on weapons of war. In the last analysis, human security means a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, an ethnic tension that did not explode, a dissident who was not silenced, a human spirit that was not crushed.”

Dr Mahbub ul Haq, from “Towards a More Compassionate Society”, State of the World Forum, November 8, 1997

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