Interviews

Messages of solidarity rang across Expo 2020 in Dubai as participants celebrated UN Day on Sunday. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed called on the world “to hold on to the hopefulness of the future of mankind and its home, the planet”.

EXPO 2020, which runs through March, includes a UN Hub where visitors can learn about the Organization’s mission for peace, development, human rights and human dignity.

UN News’s Jessica Jiji spoke to the deputy UN chief about the significance of commemorating UN Day at Expo 2020.
 

A new UN publication sheds light on the ways in which victims of human trafficking are accommodated during different stages of their trafficking ordeal.

This process known as ‘harbouring’ constitutes an act of human trafficking in the internationally recognised definition of this crime and is used by prosecutors and judges to secure convictions.

More than one million people in southern Madagascar are going hungry in what the World Food Programme (WFP) believes could become the first-ever famine brought on by climate change. 

Successive years of drought have forced people in rural communities to eat locusts, fruit and cactus leaves because they have been unable to plant or harvest sweet potatoes, tomatoes and other crops. 

For more than two years, a UN-appointed team of 59 people has been collecting and analyzing more than two million pieces of evidence about possible human rights violations in Myanmar.
The team of professionals are formally known as the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, (IIMM) or Myanmar Mechanism, and was created in 2018 by the Human Rights Council.
In an extensive interview with UN News, the head of the Mechanism, Nicholas Koumjian, explains the importance of preserving this evidence before it is potentially lost.

It’s not very often at the UN that we get the chance to talk to talented musicians whose work can help to promote the Organization’s goals of peace, human rights and development; but that’s exactly what happened when Mali songwriter Vieux Farka Touré agreed to tell us all about his brand new composition, A Song For The Sahel. 

It’s not very often at the UN that we get the chance to talk to talented musicians whose work can help to promote the Organization’s goals of peace, human rights and development; but that’s exactly what happened when Mali songwriter Vieux Farka Touré agreed to tell us all about his brand new composition, A Song For The Sahel. 

When he went to school for the first time, five-year-old Kailash Satyarthi saw a child cobbler, sitting outside the school gate.  

Seeing the impoverished boy having to work and unable to go to class, gave him a new perspective, and set him on the road to becoming a passionate child rights advocate.  

Kailash Satyarthi has been at the forefront of the global movement to end child slavery for decades now.  

The most important action the world can take to tackle the climate crisis is to quickly decarbonize every mode of transportation on earth, according to one determined expert, starting with buses. 

Alex Mitchell, Senior Vice President of Unlocking Innovation at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, and author of the newsletter, Sustainable Mobility, says that carbon is an existential threat that the world has an obligation to remove from transport. 

Three years after being appointed by the Secretary-General, the Force Commander for the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) ended his tour of duty just a few days ago. 

Lieutenant General Dennis Gyllenspore, from Sweden, led over 13,000 women and men, often in challenging conditions. 

When David Gressly, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen, called for $3.85 billion from international donors to avoid a point of no return in March, he said that “Yemen can’t wait”.

Five months on, some $2 billion has been received, averting the immediate risk of famine, but leaving significant gaps in desperately needed areas, such as healthcare.