Despite its 'official' abolition in 2003, slavery still exists in Niger. Girls are sold as 'Fifth Wives', a form of physical and sexual slavery. They are denied basic rights and essentially owned by their master; some are fitted with heavy bronze ankle bracelets to prevent escape. Other Nigeriens with slave ancestry suffer discrimination throughout their lives. Tom Rowe meets them.

What started with fewer than a dozen college students in protesting in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan has ballooned into a movement that has made headlines across the world. Now in its third week, the Occupy Wall Street movement has sparking sister 'Occupy' movements across the United States. By Richard Chambers.

In its boldest statement yet, hundreds of protesters marched on New York's iconic Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday. Through imaginative yet peaceful dissent, the Wall Street protesters have captured an ongoing slot in America's mainstream media. Just as the 15M movement in Spain and activists' across the Middle East, these  demonstrators' have given their cause a visibility through the use of social media. 

Devoid of police brutality, certain heavy-handed incidents granted Occupy Wall Street a number of publicity coups. Officer Anthony Bologna’s pepper spraying of protesters on 24 September sparked controversy and news of the incident quickly spread around the world. The arrest of over 700 people on Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday similarly caught the imaginations of newsdesks across the world.

Palestine's bid for statehood at the UN is likely to fall at the first hurdle of the Security Council, and never reach the General Assembly, but the effort has drawn attention to the reality of Palestine – Israeli military occupation, neverending settlement building, the sham of negotiations, etc – in a way that nothing else has done in recent years. By David Morrison.

On 23 September 2011, President Mahmoud Abbas made a formal application for UN membership for a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital, that is, in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip – the Palestinian territories which have been under Israeli military occupation since June 1967.

The Palestinian leadership has been under fierce pressure from the US and the EU not to apply for UN membership, so it is a minor miracle that the application has actually been made.  The EU has been doing its best to save the US from the opprobrium in the Arab world and further afield of having to apply its veto in the Security Council in order to block the application at the behest of Israel.

The ‘Arab Spring’ has raised the cost to US elites of conspicuous support for Israel, and if the Palestinian bid for statehood is successful, Israel will suffer “a painful and dramatic process of Southafricanization” and become an international pariah. By Jamie Stern-Weiner.

The wave of popular uprisings across the Middle East created many new spaces for popular political participation. Even where those new spaces are now coming under counterrevolutionary attack, as in Egypt, many Arab governments have had to modify their policies to better reflect the views of an increasingly assertive public.

With the Obama administration poised to use its Security Council veto to block Palestine’s bid to gain full UN membership next week, the most likely outcome is an upgrade of Palestine’s existing observer status by the General Assembly from ‘entity’ to ‘non-member state’. Another alternative is that the General Assembly will simply be asked to grant collective recognition to a Palestinian state, without any formal change to Palestine’s observer status. The necessary General Assembly majority for either of those options is already guaranteed by the support of Asian, African and Latin American states for Palestinian statehood, but the weight of the UN’s recognition can be bolstered by the endorsement of EU states, who await full details of the Palestinian request with a view to arriving at a common voting position. With that in mind, what factors should sway Irish government considerations in advance of next week’s assembly?

America’s excessive reaction to the 9/11 attacks was the prelude to a decade of damage and injustice on a vast scale. An understanding of what went wrong is essential to progress in the next ten years, says Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh.

In September 2001, I was a proud New Yorker. As an Iranian who had emigrated to the United States in the early 1980s, I had experienced wars and revolutions firsthand. But I was still awestruck at the spectacular devastation downtown, the eerie silence uptown and the grieving relatives at the Family Assistance Center at Pier 94 where I volunteered after work.

9/11 was a global event which generated global empathy and solidarity for the United States. Flags few at half-mast all over Europe, as Le Monde’s Jean-Marie Colombani proclaimed: “We are all Americans.” Across the world, even in countries riven by war, ravaged by famine, or cursed by oil, people genuinely sympathised with the victimised land of plenty.

An EU-Libya framework agreement signed in 2010 is only the tip of the iceberg of shameful EU extraterritorialised migration-management, argues Polly Pallister-Wilkins.

As Tripoli falls to the rebels and the National Transitional Council prepares to take over the government of the whole country the EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström has been facing some tough questions from the Swedish press about a visit she and the Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy Štefan Füle made to Libya in October 2010. This visit was billed by the European Commission at the time as “the culmination of increased dialogue and part of the new momentum in EU-Libya relations” which resulted according to the Commission in several positive developments. Along with the creation of what sounds like a fairly dry bilateral ‘Framework Agreement’ that would establish the first legally binding relationship between the EU and Libya and the announcement of the opening of an EU office in Tripoli came two other announcements. One that would see the EU increase its financial support to Libya to €60 million over the period 2011-2013 and the second being an agreement to develop cooperation with Libya on issues relating to migration-management.

Already devastated by the loss of their homes in the earthquake of 2010, the displaced people living in Haiti's tent cities now face the constant threat of violence, disease and eviction. By Justin Frewen.

On 12 January 2010, Haiti was devastated by an earthquake which struck some 10 miles southwest of the capital Port-au-Prince. Recording 7.0 on the Richter scale, it left an estimated 220,000 people dead, and over 300,000 more injured. Haiti’s already inadequate infrastructure was also severely affected as the earthquake damaged or destroyed as many as 250,000 homes according to the Haitian government and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) - leaving around 1.5 million people homeless – and 4,000 schools. Already one of the poorest countries in the world, the earthquake was a natural disaster that the country could well have done without.