The UK must take urgent and decisive action to reinvigorate the peace processes in Sudan, says Giles Fraser. Only with real international leadership can we hope to realise our commitment to protect the dignity of human life in Sudan.

Violence in southern Sudan is rife, with many women, children and elderly people among the victims, the new head of the Sudan Council of Churches, the Rev Ramadan Chan Liol, has warned.

Dr Rowan Williams is backing calls for a renewed commitment to sustainable peace in Sudan, an area of the world he has visited and has a strong personal commitment to.

Church agencies and analysts have warned that the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed four years ago to put an end to a two-decade long civil war in Sudan is threatened with breakdown.

"We remain committed to work side by side with the churches", the president of Southern Sudan Salva Kiir Mayardit has told representatives of an international ecumenical delegation in Juba, Southern Sudan.

Two years after the signing of a peace agreement to end a 21-year-long civil war in Sudan, some church leaders in south Sudan are urging eventual secession for their region, saying Khartoum has failed to make unity attractive - writes Fredrick Nzwili for Ecumenical News International.

The General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the Rev Dr Ishmael Noko, will lead an interfaith delegation to North and South Sudan from 9 to 13 January 2007 ‚Ä' reports LWI.

Peacemakers are helping communities resolve differences and recover from violence in Sudan's Darfur region despite a devastating four-year-old war that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and is continuing to escalate - writes Tim Shenk of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the North American peace church development organisation.