Interviews

The son and former wife of Brazilian football legend Pelé, have been talking to UN News about the father and husband they knew, recalling his big but soft heart - and love for children from all walks of life across the country.

His son, Joshua Nascimento joined his mother, Assíria Lemos, in conversation with Monica Grayley, head of our Portuguese service, to talk about the legacy of the footballing great and three-time World Cup winner, who died in hospital in Sao Paulo, on Thursday.

Hate speech has cost the lives of UN peacekeepers and civilians on the ground they are there to protect in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the head of MONUSCO, the UN mission there, has said, but new initiatives to counter the scourge are making a difference. 

Bintou Keita, who’s also the UN Special Representative in DRC, told UN News MONUSCO was countering fake-news and intolerance online, and the Government is working effectively to crack down on hate. 

Fifty-one point five billion dollars: that’s the staggering amount that UN relief chief Martin Griffiths has asked donors for, to help 230 million extremely vulnerable people in nearly 70 countries next year.

Although relief needs are growing, Mr. Griffiths is under no illusion that less than half of what he’s requested will be provided.

Which is why he’s convinced that the money should come from other sources, including non-earmarked development funding, and even a windfall tax on energy companies, as he explains to UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

Forty years into the battle against AIDS, a new UN report spotlights fundamental inequalities as the key reason why the disease has yet to be eradicated. 

Just ahead of World AIDS Day, César Núñez of UNAIDS, the UN agency leading the fight against the virus, told UN News that gender inequality is “a key driver” of the epidemic – along with other prevailing inequalities, especially those impacting vulnerable sex workers, prisoners, and intravenous drug users. 

The current review of the world’s primary biological weapons treaty taking place in Geneva needs to “break the deadlock” over a verification mechanism, the top diplomat presiding the talks has told UN News.

Even if that thorny issue remains unresolved, there are other proposals on the table that could make it harder to produce lab-made threats in future, Ambassador Leonardo Bencini explains to UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

Although several groundbreaking treatments for diabetes are in the pipeline, some patients still cannot get access to lifesaving insulin, which was discovered over a century ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports. 

Diabetes is rising across the globe, in part due to population ageing but also obesity and other lifestyle factors.  Currently, more than 420 million people are living with the disease, which impacts blood sugar levels, mainly in low and middle-income countries. 

Presiding over the UN Human Rights Council this year has felt like captaining a ship in the middle of a tsunami, 

On Friday, Judge Leonardo Brant was elected to serve on the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principle judicial organ of the UN, which settles legal disputes between Member States.

The Brazilian jurist joins a bench of 15 eminent justices from around the world, who hear cases that can often take years to work their way through the system, with profound consequences for not only the countries involved, but entire regions.

Just as racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination should have no place in the world, “povertyism” – or negative attitudes and behaviour towards poor people - should also be illegal. 

That’s the hope of Olivier De Schutter, the UN expert working to give greater prominence to the plight of the millions of people across the globe who are living in extreme poverty. 

Countries in the ‘Global South’ recognize Israel’s “settler colonialism” manifested through its illegal occupation of the West Bank and other Palestinian territory, said the UN's independent expert for human rights there, after delivering her first report to the General Assembly.