Interviews

The UN’s Victims’ Rights Advocate who champions the rights and dignity of victims of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), has urged more women to come forward in Haiti, if they have paternity claims against UN personnel serving in former peacekeeping missions there. 

In an interview with UN News, Jane Connors acknowledges that around 28 women already have outstanding claims, relating to 34 children. 

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused unprecedented disruption in many areas of our lives, and that’s true of a key UN forum as well: the Human Rights Council.

On Thursday, it announced the suspension of its current inter-governmental session in Geneva, meaning that voting on Resolutions is on hold, until it can resume its work, promoting and protecting people’s human rights across the world.

Several climate records were broken in 2019 across the world, including unprecedented temperature highs and extreme weather events.

Ahead of the launch of the World Meteorological Organization’s flagship report –WMO’s Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019 – the agency’s Secretary-General Petteri Taalas sat down with Ben Malor from UN News, and started by outlining some of the main points from the study.

Children are born innocent, “regardless” of their relationship to extremist fighters from the terrorist group known as ISIL or Da’esh, “and they should be treated with kindness and love”.  

That’s one of the key points emphasized by religious leaders in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Monday, in an unprecedented joint declaration, calling for justice on behalf of victims of the terrorist group, which once controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria.  

Wrapping up a two-day visit to the northwest part of Syria last week, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore, and World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley stressed the urgent need to provide families with basic services.  

The visit comes amid a dangerous escalation in northwest Syria and as the conflict is about to enter its 10th year.  

With COVID-19, an on-going global concern, satellite imagery can play a powerful role in tracking where we are and how we’re responding to “restrictions on movement” due to the coronavirus.

That’s according to Robert Chen, co-chair of the Thematic Research Network on Data and Statistics, known as TReNDS, who was at UN Headquarters this week to discuss his initiative, which is part of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

The streets of China’s capital having gone eerily quiet, following the COVID-19 outbreak, Beijing is now slowly returning to its usual vibrant self.  

Cases are falling, and people are cautiously returning to work, following new advice laid out by the World Health Organization (WHO).   

The former Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who has died aged 100, was responsible for a series of diplomatic breakthroughs that were “perhaps without parallel, in the history of the UN.”

That’s according to his most senior aide, Chef de Cabinet Virendra Dayal, in an interview on Thursday by phone from his home in Delhi.

As deaths continue to rise from the coronavirus outbreak, its economic consequences are becoming clearer, too.

In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, Pamela Coke-Hamilton from the UN Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD, highlights how the challenge posed by the disease to China’s key role in global manufacturing, will likely affect rich and poor countries alike.

Reassuringly, she also explains that for now at least, there’s no reason to panic.

After more than 240 days, the Australian state of New South Wales is finally free from bushfires, officials there announced last week.

But the massive wildfires have scorched millions of acres in the country since July last year, and Australia remains highly vulnerable to further natural disasters.

In an interview with UN News, Jennifer Pierson, Wildlife Program Leader at the Tidbinbilla Nature Park, just outside Canberra, said that climate change needs to start being integrated in conservancy programs, and more genetic diversity management is needed.