Africa

This is the fifth year in a row that nearly 1,000 migrants have died or gone missing crossing the Mediterranean. Nearly 48,000 asylum-seekers and migrants have reached Europe’s shores in the first six months of 2018. Many of them passed through Benin on their way to Europe.

South Africans await judgement to be handed down in a court case that could set a sweeping precedent by empowering communities on communal land with the right to reject new mining projects. Calling the case a referendum on “the right to say no,” residents of several rural villages are asking the court to reinterpret current minerals extraction legislation to compel mining companies to gain explicit community consent prior to breaking ground on new operations. “The land is our identity. When we lose that land, we lose who we are,” Nonhle Mbuthuma, leader of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, said of the court case.

Morocco's movements are on the march for human rights, jobs, water, and economic alternatives. They have challenged the political establishment and face increasing repression and jail time. The coming weeks and months will likely be critical as pressure builds to release political prisoners, protests continue, and temperatures rise.

Two South African women, Makoma Lekalakala and Liz McDaid, have won the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s largest award honoring grassroots environmental activists, for stopping their government’s massive secret nuclear deal with Russia – a deal that would have threatened the country’s health, environment and finances.

With Zimbabwe’s new President Emmerson Mnangagwa just concluding a 100-day timeline to address what he considered the country’s most pressing issues, which focused on economic revival, human rights activists have their own timeline. Survivors of the 1980s Gukurahundi atrocities, where a campaign by government soldiers claimed thousands of civilian lives, are demanding that the new president address the country’s dark past.

Last month marked the seventh anniversary of the February 20 Movement, a pro-democracy movement born in Morocco in the wake of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. To celebrate the anniversary of one of the most defining events of Morocco’s recent political history, hundreds of protesters took to the streets. “People are not afraid anymore,” said human rights activist and trade unionist Abdellah Lefnatsa. “Everywhere, the population takes its inspiration from the February 20 Movement."