Category: Human Rights

U.S. Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice Desirée Cormier Smith will travel to Geneva and New York City April 15-23. In Geneva, the Special Representative and Ambassador Michèle Taylor will represent the United States as heads of delegation at the third meeting of the UN Permanent Forum for People on African Descent. There the Special Representative will deliver […]

Twenty years have passed since the media broke the story that US forces and the CIA were torturing “war on terror” detainees at Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons in Iraq. But for the men who were tortured, it feels like only yesterday. The physical and mental scars they carry serve as daily reminders of […]

Agreement in Brussels on the New Pact on Migration and Asylum reportedly followed three years of intense negotiations, and it should start taking effect in 2024. The deal will attempt to distribute migrants more evenly across the bloc, providing enhanced support and coordination for processing claims away from frontier states such as Italy and Greece, […]

Hundreds of young people stormed a building basement where scores of Rohingya refugees were sheltered, according to media reports. The Rohingya are a mainly Muslim community who have fled waves of persecution in Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country.  Nearly one million are living in camps in Bangladesh and more than 1,000 have arrived in Indonesia […]

That’s according to Juliette Touma, Director of Communications for UNRWA, the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees, who spoke in depth to UN News’s Conor Lennon on Monday about her most recent visit to the Strip. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. “This was my second trip since the war began. I try […]

“I was having coffee at home this morning in Kyiv, my neighbours were getting ready for work, children preparing to go to school, when our homes started to shake because of a wave of airstrikes on the Ukrainian capital,” Denise Brown said in a statement. The attacks damaged civilian buildings just next to the UN […]

The Russian-born actor, filmmaker and photographer was appointed a special consultant to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in connection with World Refugee Year. Ahead of the International Human Fraternity Day, marked annually on 4 February, this week’s #ThrowbackThursday edition focuses on the Hollywood stars who focused on the plight of […]

“The agency will no longer have funding as of the end of February, so that means our operations would come to a halt during March,” said Dorothee Klaus, UNRWA Director in Lebanon, describing the “severe impact” of fresh budget cuts. The funding crisis stemmed from Israel’s allegations that a dozen agency staff were involved in […]

Nearly 8,600 people on the move died in 2023, a 20 per cent increase from 2022, according to the UN agency’s Missing Migrants Project online platform. It details the global movement of people risking their lives to escape conflict, economic crisis and natural disasters, including drought and flooding linked to climate change. IOM says the […]

While ceasefire talks failed to end the five-month-long conflict that has killed nearly 32,000 Palestinians – most of them women and children – the goal of some youngsters living in the makeshift camp was simple. The children of Deir Al-Balah decided to lift their spirits in the face of ongoing war and celebrate the holy […]