General News

News that the European Union-wide refugee resettlement scheme has begun has been welcomed by the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR.

Nineteen Eritrean asylum-seekers left Italy’s Ciampino airport in Rome on Friday morning, bound for Sweden.

They’d agreed to be relocated there after arriving by boat to Sicily.

Under the EU scheme, participating member states have agreed to house 160,000 refugees.

Daniel Johnson reports.

Aid programmes for Palestinian refugees in the Middle East supported by the UN will continue to face austerity measures, it has been announced.

The international community met at UN headquarters in New York on Thursday to discuss funding for UNWRA, the agency which serves five million Palestinian refugees.

Its annual budget is around US$750 million.

For part of 2015, UNWRA has been running a budget deficit.

May Yaacoub has been speaking to Sandra Mitchell, the agency’s Deputy Commissioner-General.

Political violence will not be tolerated during this month’s elections, said the head of the UN mission in Haiti on Thursday.

Briefing the Security Council ahead of the 25 October vote, Sandra Honoré, head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), also said the mission needed to be extended by at least a year.

After years of political instability and a devastating earthquake in 2010, a first round of elections held in August were marred by violence.

Ordinary Americans are reaching into their wallets to support the growing number of refugees worldwide.  The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has launched a first-of-its-kind online campaign designed to solicit donations from the American public.

The online platform Kickstarter is hosting the campaign, which raised more than US $1 million to help refugees in just one day.

Thousands of members of the Yazidi community, which the terrorist group ISIL regards as apostates, were captured and sold into slavery last year.

A briefing at UN headquarters on ISIL and its impact on women in Iraq heard testimony from one young victim who had been sold into slavery and then raped.

Matthew Wells reports.

Duration: 2'44"

The opportunity to hold free and fair elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is disappearing according to the UN’s most senior official in the country.

Voters are due to go to the polls next year, despite continued instability in the east of the country where government FARDC forces struggle to retain law and order.

Martin Kobler is the head of the UN mission in the country, MONUSCO.

New rules to help improve the treatment of prisoners around the world, were formally presented at United Nations headquarters on Wednesday.

The updated standards – also known as the “Nelson Mandela Rules” - outline standard minimum treatment practices for those who are incarcerated.

The Secretary General’s representative said they should be seen as a “work in progress”.

Cuba has been out of bounds for American tourists for more than 50 years due to the US embargo on the Caribbean country, but the number of US visitors is set to grow according to International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The recent reestablishment of diplomatic relations could open the floodgates to a generation of tourists wanting to explore the island.

People across the world are being asked to help solve a mystery which has been troubling UN officials.

The UN’s Dag Hammarskjöld Library recently came across a six different copies of the UN Charter written in languages librarians are unable to identify.

The library has launched a public appeal via social media for help in identifying the languages as the organization celebrates 70 years since the signing of the Charter.

African countries are increasingly turning towards nuclear power to meet their growing energy needs and pull them out of the “dark”.

That’s according to the head of Kenya’s Nuclear Electricity Board, one of many African countries where nuclear power is being considered.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says worldwide, more than 30 countries are looking into establishing nuclear energy programmes.  Many of those nations are developing countries, with about one-third of them in Africa.