Interviews

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.

Conditions on the ground are dire for the thousands of Haitian migrants being forced to return to their homeland from the Americas, many of them “empty handed”, and bewildered. 

That’s according to Giuseppe Loprete, chief of the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) Mission in Haiti, who told UN News that around 5,500 people have been forcibly returned since 19 September, with thousands more expected in the days ahead.  

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty opened for signature 25 years ago this month but hasn’t yet entered into force.  

In his first UN News interview, the new head of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) notes that prior to 1996, when the Treaty opened for signature, around 2,000 nuclear tests were conducted, but since then, only three countries have crossed the line - only one of those, this century.  

Afghan political exile Zarifa Ghafari fled Kabul shortly after the Taliban takeover on 15 August; she’d already survived three attempts on her life as one of the country’s few female mayors – and she feared the worst if she stayed.

Today, the 29-year-old activist is determined not to let the gains made by women over the last 20 years, go to waste.

She spoke in Geneva to UN News’s Daniel Johnson, who started by asking her for her assessment of the country’s new de facto rulers.