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(Nairobi) – Security forces in Sudan arrested dozens of opposition party members, students, and political activists, in the lead up to, during, and after national elections, April 13 to 16, 2015.

Those arrested included people participating in a campaign to boycott the elections “Irhal” (or “Go!” in Arabic). The African Center for Justice and Peace Studies, in a statement released the day after polls closed, documented 22 arrests on April 12 alone. Sudanese monitoring groups have reported dozens of additional arrests.

All music was banned in northern Mali in 2012 by Islamist militants. But musicians such as Khaira Arby refused to accept it. The last two years have seen a collective of musicians taking Mali's rich musical heritage on a grand Caravan of Peace – an offshoot of Mali's famous Festival in the Desert. Created to celebrate Music Freedom Day, this short film is a companion to the feature length documentary They Will Have to Kill us First. Can the musicians of Mali rescue their music in exile?

Fundamentalism knows no boundaries. In India, it was Perumal Murugan who announced the death of the writer in him. In Sri Lanka, writer Sharmila Seyyid was ‘raped’ and ‘murdered’ online on March 28, marking a new low in the history of intolerance. 

At least 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram since the start of 2014 and many have been forced into sexual slavery and trained to fight, said Amnesty International on the first anniversary of the abduction of the Chibok school girls.

Based on nearly 200 witness accounts, including 28 with abducted women and girls who escaped captivity, a new 90-page report, 'Our job is to shoot, slaughter and kill': Boko Haram’s reign of terror, documents multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Boko Haram, including the killing of at least 5,500 civilians, as it rampaged across north-east Nigeria during 2014 and early 2015.

The Amnesty International report sheds new light on the brutal methods used by the armed group in north-east Nigeria where men and boys are regularly conscripted or systematically executed and young women and girls are abducted, imprisoned and in some cases raped, forcibly married and made to participate in armed attacks, sometimes on their own towns and villages.