New Human Rights Watch head Tirana Hassan says UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers is ‘cheap politics’

The UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda would “completely erode” Britain’s standing on the world stage, the new head of Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said.

Tirana Hassan, who takes over as HRW’s executive director on Monday, also said other conservative governments in Europe were considering following Britain’s lead and looking at African states as an offshore dumping ground for asylum seekers, potentially dealing further blows to established refugee protections.

The Ghanaian-Scottish architect is curator of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, and more than half of the participants will be African. The story of architecture we are used to, she says, is incomplete

“Africa” says Lesley Lokko, stopping over in a London hotel on the way from Accra to Venice, “is the world’s youngest continent. It is the most rapidly urbanising and has the fewest architects.” It is therefore a place of instability and invention, minimally constrained by professional structures, where the “speed of change is likely to outstrip the ability to understand it”. Its countries, meanwhile, have on average the oldest political leaders, which makes for a gap between governance and the pace of events.

These factors make Africa, for Lokko, a place where the future is taking shape, one of unpredictable creation and imagination, qualities that she plans to bring to the ancient city of Venice, that highly preserved embodiment of things past, just under two months from now. Lokko is curator of this year’s edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s most significant and influential celebration of things architectural. Under the title The Laboratory of the Future, she intends to get “Africa talking to the world”.

Latest tragedy comes as authorities in north African country crack down on undocumented sub-Saharan Africans

At least 19 people from sub-Saharan Africa have died while trying to reach Italy after the boat carrying them across the Mediterranean sank off the coast of Tunisia.

It is the latest disaster involving people departing from north African country, where the authorities have launched a brutal crackdown on undocumented sub-Saharan Africans. Last month, Tunisia’s president, Kais Saied, made an incendiary, racist speech in which he claimed irregular migration from other parts of Africa was part of an international conspiracy to change Tunisia’s demographic character.

In his series Fulu Act, Brussels-based documentary photographer Colin Delfosse captures street artists in Kinshasa, who craft striking costumes out of everyday objects found littering the streets, such as discarded wigs, wires, soda cans and bottle lids, to raise awareness of environmental issues facing the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “The statement behind their costumes is to condemn and inform about overconsumption and its side effects, namely pollution, poverty, lack of reliable investments and so on,” says Delfosse. “By capturing these images, I’m giving an echo to their crucial work.”

• Colin Delfosse is shortlisted in the Sony world photography awards 2023. An exhibition of the photographs is at Somerset House, London, 14 April-1 May

Ex-hotelier whose actions saved lives during 1994 genocide has sentence for terrorism charges commuted

Paul Rusesabagina, a businessman whose role in saving more than 1,000 lives during the 1994 Rwandan genocide inspired the film Hotel Rwanda, is to be released from prison on Saturday after his 25-year sentence on terrorism charges was commuted.

The announcement by the Rwandan government follows intense diplomacy by the US, where Rusesabagina has permanent residency rights. Historically close ties between the two countries have been strained over the case, and Rwanda’s alleged meddling in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As his London show inspired by water and electricity opens in London, the Sudanese artist talks about the challenges his country faces and his optimism for the future

Since he was a child growing up beside the banks of the Blue Nile in Khartoum, Salah Elmur has been fascinated by water and electricity. “I don’t only mean the water that comes from taps at home, I mean water in the seas and rivers where beautiful women swim, I mean the rain, I mean fishing by fishermen, I mean water in dams and all the water in this planet …

“I even mean the towers of the water and their beauty and their different shapes standing in the middle of the cities here in Sudan, and the lines of the electricity and their stations,” says the 56-year-old artist, whose work based around these two elements forms the core of a joint exhibition that opened in London this month.

It is time for us all to stop confusing short-term aid with long-term development, says Benny Dembitzer

Your article (Malawi president declares half of country damaged by cyclone, 20 March) fills many of us with despair. The conditions of Malawi, the poorest country in English-speaking Africa, have been gradually worsening over the last 40 years. This is in part due to global climate change, but also to too much aid, which has been misinterpreted as development.

Aid has discouraged local agency at all levels. According to the NGO Explorer website, there are over 900 NGOs working in Malawi registered with the Charity Commission in the UK. Then there are all the Irish, German and American NGOs and their projects. Floods and cyclones have affected the country in the last 20 years. Having more voluntary agencies coming into Malawi with their individual recipes to save the country is simply not going to help.

Move follows peace deal between rebels and federal government that ended two-year conflict

The Ethiopian government has said it has appointed a senior official in the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) as head of the interim Tigray regional administration after a peace deal ended a brutal two-year conflict.

“Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has appointed Getachew Reda as president of the Tigray region’s interim administration,” Abiy’s office said in a statement posted on Twitter on Thursday.

Up and coming politician will focus on wealth redistribution, female representation and healthcare

Ireti Kingibe is not the usual Nigerian politician. Four years ago, the engineer wife of a former minister was considering leaving the country for the US or Britain, or at least going on a cruise.

The self-declared idealist was “profoundly disappointed” with how Africa’s most populous country was being run. “I told everybody I was done with politics and went indoors,” she said in an interview.

Proposed laws in Uganda would mean death and life imprisonment for some LGBTQ+ crimes

The United Nations has urged Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni to block an anti-LGBTQ+ bill that has harsh penalties for some homosexual offences, including death and life imprisonment.

“The passing of this discriminatory bill – probably among the worst of its kind in the world – is a deeply troubling development,” Volker Turk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement.

Five deaths and three further cases of the Ebola-like virus have been reported in the country’s north-west

Tanzania has announced its first outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus disease (MVD), after five fatalities and three further cases were reported at a hospital in the country’s north-west Kagera region.

Through contact tracing, approximately 161 people have been identified as at risk of infection, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The government has deployed an emergency response team to the area and neighbouring countries have stepped up surveillance. No cases have yet been reported outside Kagera.

Despite billions spent on the humanitarian response, Somalia faces another year of drought and hunger. We desperately need money, but it needs to be better spent

In Somalia, we are climate-vulnerable, yet we barely contribute to climate emissions. If we are to cope, we need justice in the form of financing.

We’ve seen droughts, but never six consecutive failed rainy seasons. We’ve known displacement, but never 3 million internally displaced people. We were at the brink of famine in October last year, we narrowly averted it, and we’re facing similar conditions today, with 8.3 million people needing urgent assistance.

Director hopes to educate Germans about ‘brutal’ colonial history of mass killings in early 20th century

It was one of the darkest eras in German history, and the first genocide of the 20th century: the mass killing of tens of thousands of people in German South West Africa after a rebellion against colonial rule by the Herero and Nama tribes.

More than 100 years later, a feature film about the violence perpetrated by Germany in what is now Namibia explores that brutal colonial past for the first time. Its director hopes Measures of Men will bring the calamitous episode to the attention of ordinary Germans.

Members of parliament in Uganda have passed a bill that would make homosexual acts punishable by death, attracting strong condemnation from rights campaigners. Nearly all the 389 legislators voted on Tuesday for the anti-homosexuality bill that introduces capital and life imprisonment sentences for gay sex and 'recruitment, promotion and funding' of same-sex 'activities'. The bill will now go to President Yoweri Museveni, who can veto it or sign it into law. But in a recent speech he appeared to express support for the bill. The bill marks the latest in a string of setbacks for LGBTQ+ rights in Africa, where homosexuality is illegal in most countries. Human rights campaigners have condemned the move to enact the harsh law, describing it as 'hate legislation'

• Ugandan MPs pass bill imposing death penalty for homosexuality

Human rights campaigners condemn bill introducing capital and life imprisonment sentences

MPs in Uganda have passed a controversial anti-LGBTQ+ bill, which would make homosexual acts punishable by death, attracting strong condemnation from rights campaigners.

Nearly all of the 389 legislators voted late on Tuesday for the hardline anti-homosexuality bill, which introduces capital and life imprisonment sentences for gay sex and “recruitment, promotion and funding” of same-sex “activities”.

Ally’s criticism will be hard to dismiss as UK tries to push through £120m migrant scheme

Britain’s closest ally, the US, has criticised Rwanda’s dire human rights record describing conditions in the country’s detention centres as harsh to life threatening.

The British home secretary, Suella Braverman, took a group of journalists on a trip last week to reveal details of her £120m scheme to send all migrants arriving in the UK through irregular means to Rwanda whether they claim asylum or not. The legality of the scheme is due to be tested shortly in the UK court of appeal.

New report uncovers tragic scale of climate-led crisis and warns of up to 34,000 more deaths so far this year

A new report released by the Somalian government suggests that far more children died in the country last year due to the ongoing drought than previously realised.

The study estimates that there were 43,000 excess deaths in 2022 in Somalia due to the deepening drought compared with similar droughts in 2017 and 2018.

The west African country, a leading cotton producer, is moving into processing finished goods, seen as a route to prosperity

When Muriel Akouewanou finished her studies in natural sciences in Benin, she struggled to find work and was unemployed for two years. Then, she saw an advert on TV. Textile factories were being built in a new industrial zone, 28 miles from Cotonou, the city where Akouewanou, 24, lived with her parents, and they needed workers.

“To be honest, it didn’t appeal to me,” she says. “It was something I’d never done, I’d never worked with machines.” Nevertheless, she applied, and was accepted on to the six-month training scheme.

Invasive house mice threaten endangered seabirds and wildlife on Marion Island in Indian Ocean

Non-native house mice are to be removed from Marion Island in the southern Indian Ocean to protect the wandering albatross and other endangered seabirds, in the world’s largest eradication programme of its kind.

Mice accidentally introduced on to the remote island by 19th-century seal hunters have thrived in warmer and drier conditions over the past 30 years, devastating the island’s invertebrates and plants, and then devouring the chicks and even adults of ground- and burrow-nesting seabirds.

Ethiopian, Eritrean and rebel forces committed offences during two-year conflict, Antony Blinken has said

The United States has concluded that Ethiopian and Eritrean troops as well as rebels committed war crimes during the brutal two-year conflict, secretary of state Antony Blinken has said after visiting Addis Ababa.

Blinken, who had sounded upbeat in Ethiopia about the prospects for peace after a breakthrough 2 November accord, made a forceful call for accountability on his return to Washington.