Interviews

A South African teenager was at the UN recently to raise her voice for children everywhere, particularly on the issues of education, child labour and gender inequality.

Lathitha Beyile from Soweto read a manifesto she had written which was inspired by children in her country.

The 14-year-old also served as a guest UN spokesperson during the daily briefing for journalists at the Secretariat: part of the events celebrating World Children’s Day in November, which saw children “take over” high-visibility roles in media, politics, business and sports and entertainment.

The United Nations General Assembly on Sunday approved a $5.4 billion budget for the Organization for the biennium 2018-2019.

The programme budget covers UN activities across a range of areas, including, political affairs, international justice and law, regional cooperation for development, human rights and humanitarian affairs, and public information, among others.

Johannes Huisman, the Director of Programme Planning and Budget Division at the UN, spoke to Ben Malor on the key features.

Duration: 5'52"

For children in Yemen, there could not have been a worse year than 2017.

That’s the assessment of the Representative of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the war-torn country, Meritxell Relaño.

Besides ongoing deadly conflict, children there have faced a cholera epidemic, looming famine, a disruption in health services and a blockade hampering delivery of much-needed supplies.

Mobile police teams from the new UN mission in Haiti will bring together local communities and political leaders in efforts to find solutions to the country’s peace and justice needs.

Susan Page, Head of the UN Mission for Justice Support in Haiti (MINUJUSTH), believes this “bottom-up and top-down approach” will help strengthen rule-of law-institutions in the Caribbean nation.

Access to data is crucial for humanitarians responding to various crises worldwide.

For example, aid workers feeding hungry people in Nigeria use a mobile-based platform to monitor the price of rice and other staples to know when costs increase.

To better assist these professionals, the UN has opened the Centre for Humanitarian Data in the Netherlands that aims to improve lives by connecting people and data.

People intent on causing harm to others by misusing the Internet are a modern-day threat that the global IT community is doing all it can to overcome, one of the web’s so-called “founding fathers” said on Thursday.

Dr. Vinton Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and one of the original designers of the virtual network, gave the reassuring message at the Internet Governance Forum in Geneva.

Liberians return to the polls next week for a run-off election to replace President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first African woman to be elected a Head of State.

The vote will mark the end of an era as her legacy will be tied to UN efforts to build peace in the aftermath of two civil wars between 1989 and 2003.

That’s according to Farid Zarif, head of the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), which concludes its mandate in March after 15 years there.

Restrictions that affect people in their daily lives are increasingly finding their way online, a leading human rights expert said on Wednesday.

David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Freedom of Expression, made his comments on the sidelines of the Internet Governance Forum (#IGF2017) taking place in Geneva.

Documenting the horrors suffered by the Yazidis at the hands of ISIL, or Daesh, terrorists provides a “positive weapon” to confront the dangers of modern-day genocide.

That’s one of the hopes expressed by the German-Yazidi producer of a new film screened at the UN this week called Háwar – A Cry For Help.

Düzen Tekkal was a journalist and filmmaker who became a human rights activist “overnight” when Daesh invaded the Yazidi villages around Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014.

Peacekeepers at the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) have been trained in how to be more aware of incidents of gender-based violence.

They took part in a recent workshop organized to remind contingents of their role to fully protect civilians in a country where rape has been used as a weapon of war.