Interviews

Amid reports of massacres in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ebola-hit Ituri province, World Health Organization workers continue to risk their lives to prevent the disease from spreading deeper into rural areas.

In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, Dr. Ibrahima Soce Fall, WHO’s Assistant Director-General for Emergency Response explains how the agency operates in this dangerous region.

Peace between government and opposition forces in South Sudan “hangs in the balance,” but there is an overwhelming desire from people in the eastern African country for an end to the five-year long conflict there; that’s according to David Shearer, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for South Sudan.

Some four million people have been forced to flee their homes since fighting broke out between the Government led by Salva Kiir and opposition forces loyal to the former Vice-President, Riek Machar.

Every month, the UN rescues around 1,200 people from the vast Sahara Desert, near Niger, many after they’ve been abandoned by traffickers who promised to take them to Libya, Nigeria or Morocco.

In an interview with Daniel Johnson from UN News, Joel Millman from the UN migration agency, IOM, says that without its help, “virtually all of them” would perish.

With hundreds killed and more than 30,000 injured so far during the Gaza-Israel border protests, known as “The Great March of Return”, many Palestinians are now facing a future of life-long disability, unable to get the treatment they need.  

Accountability for the murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi will be difficult to prove, but it is nothing less than the international community owes him, the UN-appointed independent rights expert involved in investigating his death has said.

In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, Agnès Callamard, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, suggests which judicial tools might help to make this happen.

Epilepsy affects some 50 million people around the world and eight in 10 of these live in low to middle-income countries, the World Health Organization said on Thursday. In an interview with UN News’s Samuel Mungai, WHO’s Dr. Tarun Dua explains how to help sufferers and what the strategies are that are being put in place to reduce stigma faced by those with the condition.

South Korea’s donation of 50,000 tonnes of rice and 4.5 million dollars to help its struggling northern neighbour, will support up to two million people hit by drought and successive poor harvests, the World Food Programme said on Wednesday.

In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, WFP spokesperson Hervé Verhoosel, describes how more than 10 million people in mainly rural areas in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) face chronic food shortages.

This means that some families only eat eggs and other protein a handful of times a year, he says.

Partnerships are at the “core” of efforts to reach the sustainable development goals, the poverty and environmental targets agreed by world leaders in 2015.

That’s according to Deidre Boyd, the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Thailand, the UN’s most senior official in the country.

The way we produce food today is damaging ecosystems around the world and threatening biodiversity, despite being more abundant and of better quality than ever before.

That’s a paradox highlighted by former top UN official Dr. David Nabarro in an interview with UN News this week, after he’d taken part in The Future of Food International Symposium in Rome, organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The chestnut tree that Anne Frank could see from her famous attic hiding place in Amsterdam during the Second World War, was seen by the young girl as a symbol of hope and the natural world, that she longed to touch again.  

Considered a living symbol of both Anne Frank’s legacy and of the values embodied by the United Nations, a sapling descended from that very tree, was planted in the gardens of UN headquarters in New York, on Wednesday.