Category: English

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, Professor of Practice, International Human Rights Law, Tufts University

Member states of the African Union (AU) will hold their most consequential election of the year in February 2026, to fill ten vacancies in continental human rights institutions.

They will elect three experts to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and seven to the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.

These individuals will serve on the committee for five years and on the commission for six, alongside 23 peers with unexpired terms.

The elections are important because these institutions exist primarily to ensure that the continent’s governments take African lives seriously. They are entrusted with ensuring that Africans live in dignity and equality. This is a difficult task in a continent where human rights often sound hollow or precarious.

As a scholar who studies Africa’s regional institutions, I find that they are deeply underestimated. Yet, these institutions have considerable powers to undertake investigations and issue decisions against African governments. Their decisions can attract serious sanctions if disregarded.

Recent events show why these institutions continue to matter. Several AU treaties, particularly the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, protect the right to vote and mandate independent and impartial courts as arbiters of election disputes.

However, most of Africa’s elections are now more poorly managed than ever before. In 2025 alone – in Cameroon, Côte d‘Ivoire and Tanzania, among others – thousands of Africans were killed in state-sponsored election violence.

In many African countries, the judiciary and other independent institutions face attacks or are captured by politicians, depriving people of legal recourse.

This has contributed to deepening civic apathy, a creeping return of military and authoritarian rule, and further erosion of democratic governance.

Of course, treaty institutions do not organise or supervise national elections. But they can counter authoritarianism by mobilising responses to the underlying causes of rigged elections.

This is why Africans everywhere should show an interest in the process and outcome of the African Union’s February 2026 elections for continental human rights institutions. They protect the continent’s citizens and communities.

Good intentions, poor outcomes

When the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) elected the pioneer experts to the African Commission in 1987, most were senior ministers from dictatorships.

Today, the AU no longer elects obvious politicians to these bodies. Still, the candidates are mostly aligned with ruling African governments.

This was not the intention. The continental institutions were created to respond when, for instance, governments attacked protesters, shut down the internet, displaced communities without compensation, or hijacked elections.

The institutions are Africa’s official human rights enforcers. They should ensure that governments uphold the principles and values they have undertaken under continental treaties. Those include “respect for democratic principles, human rights, the rule of law and good governance” and “respect for the sanctity of human life”.

For this reason, the treaties only allow to be elected to these roles “African personalities of the highest reputation, known for their high morality, integrity, impartiality, and competence in matters of human and peoples’ rights.” Such individuals work in their personal capacities and not as stooges of any government.

In practice, these criteria are not always met.

Regrettably, most Africans are unaware that these mechanisms exist. That affects the credibility of the selection process.

The AU doesn’t give the selection much publicity. Although it nominally encourages member states to adopt transparent nomination processes, most states prefer to keep their nominations ad hoc and opaque.

A 2020 report by Amnesty International described the selection as characterised by “secrecy and largely merit-less national nomination processes”. Three years earlier, the Open Society Justice Initiative and the International Commission of Jurists similarly criticised it as “largely unknown and shrouded in secrecy”.

In 2023, African citizens and civil society instituted the Arusha Initiative to improve citizen awareness, the quality of nominations and the outcomes.

What should happen

These institutions, especially the African Commission and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, exist to foster shared values. They are committed to the rule of law and due process. And they are supposed to create an enabling environment for entrepreneurs and investors, who in turn can help develop the continent.

By protecting labour and land rights, these mechanisms guide states in implementing socio-economic rights in Africa and support innovation. By addressing all forms of discrimination, including xenophobia, they can also encourage mobility across the continent.

By advancing jurisprudence on free movement as a human right and promoting associated treaties that complement regional integration, these mechanisms could help achieve free movement across Africa.

The institutions could also address environmental degradation, livelihoods and forced displacement. In doing so they would centre the interests of Africa’s indigenous peoples.

Africa’s citizens and communities fund these institutions through their taxes. That alone is reason enough to care about them.

Human rights bodies should not be disembodied entities ministering from distant lands to unrepresented people. Instead, citizens should choose capable, independent experts to protect their livelihoods and futures.

Ikechukwu Uzoma, human rights lawyer and researcher at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center in the US, is co-author of this article.

– Africa’s human rights institutions are electing leaders. Why this matters
– https://theconversation.com/africas-human-rights-institutions-are-electing-leaders-why-this-matters-273495

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Thembekile Olivia Mayayise, Senior Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that makes a victim’s data, system or device inaccessible. It locks the target or encrypts it (converting text into an unreadable form) until the victim pays a ransom to the attacker.

It’s one of the most widespread and damaging forms of cyberattacks affecting organisations around the world. An Interpol report identified ransomware as one of the most widespread cyber threats across Africa in 2024. South Africa reported 12,281 detections and Egypt reported 17,849.

Despite global efforts to curb it, ransomware continues to thrive, driven by cybercriminals seeking quick financial gain. In its first-quarter 2025 report, global cybersecurity company Sophos revealed that 71% of the South African organisations hit by ransomware paid the ransom and recovered their data. But the full cost of a ransomware attack is difficult to quantify. It extends beyond the ransom payment to include revenue losses during the system downtime and potential reputational damage.

Cybercriminals often select organisations where service disruption can cause significant public or operational effects, increasing the pressure to pay the ransom. Power grids, healthcare systems, transport networks and financial systems are examples. When victims refuse to pay the ransom, attackers frequently threaten to leak sensitive or confidential information.

One reason ransomware has become so pervasive in Africa is the continent’s cybersecurity gap. Many organisations lack dedicated cybersecurity resources, along with the skills, awareness, tools and infrastructure to defend against cyberattacks.

In this environment, hackers can operate with relative ease. Every business leader, particularly those overseeing information and communication technology (ICT) or managing sensitive data, should be asking a critical question. Can our organisation survive a ransomware attack?

This is not just a technical issue; it is also a governance matter. Board members and executive teams are increasingly accountable for risk management and cyber resilience.

As a researcher and expert in the governance of information technology and cybersecurity, I see the African region emerging as a hotspot for cyberattacks. Organisations must be aware of the risks and take steps to mitigate them.

Ransomware attacks can be extremely costly, and an organisation may struggle or fail to recover after an incident.

Weaknesses that increase ransomware risk

Telecommunication company Verizon’s data breach report for 2025 revealed that the number of organisations hit by ransomware attacks had increased by 37% from the previous year. This exposes how unprepared many organisations are to prevent an attack.

A business continuity plan details how a business would continue its operations in the event of a business disruption. An ICT disaster recovery plan is part of the continuity plan. These plans are critical in ensuring continuity of operations after the attack, as affected businesses often experience prolonged downtime, loss of access to systems and data, and severe operational disruptions.

Professional hackers actually sell ransomware tools, making it easier and more profitable for cybercriminals to launch attacks without regard for their consequences.

Hackers can infiltrate systems in various ways:

• weak security controls such as weak passwords or authentication mechanisms

• unmonitored networks, where there is a lack of intrusion detection systems that can report any suspicious network activity

• human error, where employees can mistakenly click on e-mail links which contain ransomware.

Poor network monitoring can allow hackers to remain undetected long enough to collect data on vulnerabilities and identify key systems to target. In many cases, employees unknowingly introduce malicious software, links or downloading attachments from phishing emails. Phishing is a social engineering attack that uses various manipulation techniques to deceive a user into disclosing sensitive details, such as payment or login details, or to trick them into clicking on malicious links.

Paying up

Attackers commonly demand payment in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies because the payments will be quite difficult to trace. Paying the ransom offers no guarantee of full data recovery or protection against future attacks. According to global cybersecurity company Check Point, notorious ransomware groups like Medusa have popularised double extortion tactics.

These groups demand payment and threaten to publish stolen data online. They often use social media platforms and the dark web – part of the internet which is only accessible by means of special software – allowing them to remain anonymous or untraceable. Their goal is to publicly shame victims or leak sensitive information, pressuring organisations to comply.

These breaches also contribute to phishing scams, as exposed email addresses and credentials circulate across the internet, which leads to more data breaches. Websites such as Have I Been Pwned can assist in checking whether your email has been compromised in any previous data breach.

Organisational resilience against ransomware

Organisations should strengthen their cybersecurity in several ways.

• Put strong technical and administrative measures in place to keep data safe. They include effective access controls, network monitoring tools and regular system and data backups.

• Use tools that block malware attacks early and provide alerts when suspicious activities occur. This includes using strong endpoint protection ensuring that any device which connects to the network has intrusion detection systems that help spot unusual network activity.

• Equip staff with the knowledge and vigilance to detect and prevent potential threats.

• Develop, document and communicate a clear incident response plan.

• Bring in external cybersecurity experts or managed security services when the organisation does not have skills or capacity to handle security on its own.

• Develop, maintain and regularly test business continuity and ICT disaster recovery plans.

• Obtain cyber-insurance to cover the risks that can’t be completely prevented.

Ransomware attacks are a serious and growing threat to individuals and organisations. They can cause data loss, financial losses, operational disruptions and reputational damage. There are no security measures that can fully guarantee complete protection from such attacks. But the steps outlined here might help.

– Ransomware: what it is and why it’s your problem
– https://theconversation.com/ransomware-what-it-is-and-why-its-your-problem-269430

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tom Divon, Researcher , Hebrew University of Jerusalem

For as long as humans have buried their dead, they’ve dreamed of keeping them close. The ancient Fayum portraits – those stunningly lifelike images wrapped in Egyptian mummies – captured faces meant to remain present even after life had left the body.

Effigies across cultures served the same purpose: to make the absent present, to keep the dead around in some form.

But these attempts shared a fundamental limitation. They were vivid, yet they could not respond. The dead remained dead.

Across time, another idea emerged: the active dead. Ghosts who slipped back into the world to settle unfinished business, like spirits bound to old houses. Whenever they did speak, however, they needed a human medium – a living body to lend them voice and presence.

Media evolved to amplify this ancient longing to summon what is absent. Photography, film, audio recordings, holograms. Each technique added new layers of detail and new modes of calling the past into the present.

Now, generative AI promises something unprecedented: interactive resurrection.

It offers an entity that converses, answers and adapts. A dead celebrity digitally forced to perform songs that never belonged to them. A woman murdered in a domestic-violence case reanimated to “speak” about her own death. Online profiles resurrecting victims of tragedy, “reliving” their trauma through narration framed as warning or education.

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Read more: Should AI be allowed to resurrect the dead?

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We are researchers who have spent many years studying the intersection of memory, nostalgia and technology. We particularly focus on how people make meaning and remember, and how accessible technologies shape these processes.

In a recent paper, we examined how generative AI is used to reanimate the dead across everyday contexts. The easy circulation of these digital ghosts raises urgent questions: who authorises these afterlives, who speaks through them, and who decides how the dead are put to work?

What gives these audiovisual ghosts their force is not only technological spectacle, but the sadness they reveal. The dead are turned into performers for purposes they never consented to, whether entertainment, consolation or political messaging.

This display of AI’s power also exposes how easily loss, memory and absence can be adapted to achieve various goals.

And this is where a quieter emotion enters: melancholy. By this we mean the unease that arises when something appears alive and responsive, yet lacks agency of its own.

These AI figures move and speak, but they remain puppets, animated at the direction of someone else’s will. They remind us that what looks like presence is ultimately a carefully staged performance.

They are brought back to life to serve, not to live. These resurrected figures do not comfort. They trouble us into awareness, inviting a deeper contemplation of what it means to live under the shadow of mortality.

What ‘resurrection’ looks like

In our study, we collected more than 70 cases of AI-powered resurrections. They are especially common on video-heavy platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

Given their current proliferation, the first thing we did was to compare all cases and look for similarities in their purposes and application. We also noted the data and AI tools used, as well as the people or institutions employing them.

A prominent use of generative AI involves the digital resurrection of iconic figures whose commercial, cultural and symbolic value often intensifies after death. These include:

• Whitney Houston – resurrected to perform both her own songs and those of others, circulating online as a malleable relic of the past.

• Queen Elizabeth II – brought back as a rap sis from the hood to perform with a swagger drawn from Black urban culture. This transformation illustrates how nationally significant figures, once held at an ivory-tower distance, become a form of public property after death.

These algorithmic afterlives reduce the dead to entertainment assets, summoned on command, stripped of context, and remade according to contemporary whims. But AI resurrection also moves along a darker register.

• A woman who was raped and murdered in Tanzania has reappeared in AI-generated videos, where she is made to warn others not to travel alone, transforming her death into a cautionary message.

• A woman is summoned through AI to relive the most tragic day of her life, digitally reanimated to tell the story of how her husband killed her, embedding a warning about domestic violence.

Here, AI ghosts function as admonitions – reminders of injustice, war and unresolved collective wounds. In this process, grief becomes content and trauma a teaching device. AI does not merely revive the deceased. It rewrites and redistributes them according to the needs of the living.

While such interventions may initially astonish, their ethical weight lies in the asymmetry they expose – where those unable to refuse are summoned to serve purposes to which they never consented. And it is always marked by a triangle of sadness: the tragedy itself, its resurrection and the forceful reliving of the tragedy.

The melancholy

We suggest thinking in terms of two distinct registers of melancholy to locate where our unease resides and to show how readily that feeling can disarm us.

The first register concerns the melancholy attached to the dead. In this mode, resurrected celebrities or victims are summoned back to entertain, instruct or re-enact the very traumas that marked their deaths. The fascination of seeing them perform on demand dulls our capacity to register the exploitation involved, and the unease, cringe, and sadness embedded in these performances.

The second register is the melancholy attached to us, the living revivalists. Here, the unease emerges not from exploitation but from confrontation. In gazing at these digital spectres, we are reminded of the inevitability of death, even as life appears extended on our screens. However sophisticated these systems may be, they cannot re-present the fullness of a person. Instead, they quietly re-inscribe the gap between the living and the deceased.

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Read more: Can you really talk to the dead using AI? We tried out ‘deathbots’ so you don’t have to

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Death is inevitable. AI resurrections will not spare us from mourning; instead, they deepen our encounter with the inescapable reality of a world shaped by those who are no longer here.

Even more troubling is the spectacular power of technology itself. As with every new medium, the enchantment of technological “performance” captivates us, diverting attention from harder structural questions about data, labour, ownership and profit, and about who is brought back, how and for whose benefit.

Unease, not empathy

The closer a resurrection gets to looking and sounding human, the more clearly we notice what is missing. This effect is captured by the concept known as the uncanny valley, first introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. It describes how nearly-but-not-quite-human figures tend to evoke unease rather than empathy in viewers.

This is not solely a matter of technical defects in resurrections, imperfections may be reduced with better models and higher-resolution data. What remains is a deeper threshold, an anthropological constant that separates the living from the dead. It is the same boundary that cultures and spiritual traditions have grappled with for millennia. Technology, in its boldness, tries again. And like its predecessors, it fails.

The melancholy of AI lies precisely here: in its ambition to collapse the distance between presence and absence, and in its inability to do so.

The dead don’t return. They only shimmer through our machines, appearing briefly as flickers that register our longing, and just as clearly, the limits of what technology can’t repair.

– AI can make the dead talk – why this doesn’t comfort us
– https://theconversation.com/ai-can-make-the-dead-talk-why-this-doesnt-comfort-us-272944