Congo (Kinshasa)

Eleven government soldiers accused of raping more than 60 women have gone on trial in the most high-profile case yet heard by the Democratic Republic of Congo's pioneering "mobile gender court".

The men are alleged to have carried out the attacks on New Year's Day in the town of Fizi, in the South Kivu province, where sexual violence is rife amid clashes between the army and local and foreign militias.

Progress has been made toward quelling mass rapes by armed combatants in Congo, but the U.N. peacekeeping mission is still needed in the African nation and requires more helicopters to do its job, the U.N. envoy to the African country told the Security Council Monday.

The UN Security Council on Monday called on the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to strengthen efforts to prosecute perpetrators of human rights and sexual abuses.

Brazilian UN Ambassador Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, who holds the rotating Security Council presidency for February, made the statement to reporters here.

Simmering insecurity continues to force Congolese civilians in North Kivu to flee their homes and seek security in places like Kalinga, one of many camps for the internally displaced in the volatile region.

There was no field manual to consult, no military doctrine to guide the way.

For years, diplomats, aid workers, academics and government officials here have been vexed almost to the point of paralysis about how to attack this country's staggering problem of sexual violence, in which hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, many quite sadistically, by the various armed groups who haunt the hills of eastern Congo.

Hundreds of cases investigated by officers, but so far few prosecutions.

A new police unit in Lubumbashi, in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, appears to have made significant progress in tackling crimes of sexual violence, but the scale of the problem it faces is daunting.

A new centre designed to help some of the many people who have been raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo has opened.

The UN-funded City of Joy is intended to help women become activists and community leaders.

DR Congo has been called the "rape capital of the world" because of the high incidence of sexual abuse during its long conflict.

Both rebels and government troops have been accused of mass rapes.

The Democratic Republic of Congo needs to control sexual violence despite the arrest of a rebel leader tied to mass rapes, the British government said.

French authorities acting on an arrest warrant issued in September by the International Criminal Court transferred alleged Rwandan rebel leader Callixte Mbarushimana to the ICC detention center in The Hague.

United Nations officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today reported another 53 alleged cases of rape in the conflict-rife eastern part of the country, bringing to 120 those reported since the beginning of the year and attributed to all sides, including the national army.