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.
With half of Afghanistan’s children under five at risk of severe malnutrition and two-thirds of the country needing humanitarian assistance, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator is urging the international community to provide real commitments at a crucial aid conference on Monday.
In an exclusive interview for UN News in Geneva ahead of the conference, Daniel Johnson sat down with the newly-installed head of UN humanitarian affairs, (OCHA) Martin Griffiths, who recently returned from his first visit to Afghanistan, now under Taliban control.
For the people of Kazakhstan, 29 August is not just a day on the calendar but a reminder of the threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity.
That’s the message from the country’s UN Ambassador, Magzhan Ilyassov, speaking ahead of the International Day Against Nuclear Tests, observed annually on that date.
It commemorates the 1991 closure of the Semipalatinsk test site in northeastern Kazakhstan, where the Soviet Union exploded hundreds of nuclear devices over a 40-year period.
As head of the police component at the United Nations peacekeeping force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), Satu Koivu says “good competencies and skillset”, regardless of sex, will go far for those with ambitions to pursue police leadership.
With over 30 years of experience in law enforcement and policing around the globe, the Finland native acknowledges choosing a career in the force at 18 years old was not typical for females at the time, and is optimistic other women will continue to find their place in the field.
In the lead up to World Humanitarian Day, marked annually on 19 August, climate justice advocate Mitzi Jonelle is clear that the climate crisis is a humanitarian crisis.
While most people consider the environment “a scientific problem to be fixed by the scientists”, the Filipino youth activist is determined to put an “empowering human aspect” into the climate crisis battle, involving “everyday people”.
As preparations gear up for this November’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the leading scientific body responsible for assessing the latest evidence on climate change said on Monday that human activity is “indisputably” to blame.
