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Africa
Soldiers wearing red berets travelled 300 kilometres north from the Guinean capital Conakry, to Khoréra, near Boké. They were looking for Karamba Dramé, a youth leader in the town. When they found him, one of the soldiers shot him. He died before he reached hospital on 31 October 2008.
Americas
The Enxet Indigenous communities of Yakye Axa and Sawhoyamaxa in the Bajo Chaco region of Paraguay have been living at the side of the Pozo Colorado-Concepción highway formore than 15 years. Despite rulings in their favour by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, they remain excluded fromtheir lands. Deprived of their traditional livelihood and way of life, without adequate health care or sanitation, and dependent on irregular government food supplies, they face an insecure present and an uncertain future.
Asia And The Pacific
On 20 May, in Kawhmu township, near Yangon, the Myanmar authorities prevented desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis from coming out onto the street to beg while punishing people who tried to help them– effectively cutting them off fromany informal assistance. Almost three weeks earlier, the cyclone had devastated much of southern Myanmar, killing tens of thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more from their homes and livelihoods.
Europe And Central Asia
At the beginning of August 2008, two European states went to war for the first time in almost a decade. Since the conflicts of the early 1990s, Europe had assumed a degree of stability in terms of its economy, security and embedding the rule of law, but these events showed how potentially fragile the security assumptions underpinning post-Cold War Europe could be. And how – as so often – civilians and their human rights pay the price when such assumptions fail.
Middle East And North Africa
On 27 December, as 2008 drew to a close, Israeli jets launched an aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip, where 1.5million Palestinians live, crowded into one of the most densely populated areas of the planet. In the following three weeks,more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including some 300 children, and some 5,000 were wounded. Israeli forces repeatedly breached the laws of war, including by carrying out direct attacks on civilians and civilian buildings and attacks targeting Palestinian militants that caused a disproportionate toll among civilians.
