This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.
Displacement crisis driving up hunger in northern Mozambique
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Tuesday that without emergency funding, one of the world’s fastest-growing displacement crises, in northern Mozambique, risks becoming a hunger emergency, as families continue to flee insurgent attacks.
WFP chief David Beasley said that the conflict has destroyed jobs, “lives and hopes for the future”, with insurgents ripping families apart, burning their homes, and traumatizing children.
In a statement, he said “innocent communities” were now “completely reliant on WFP and our partners to provide them with lifesaving food and help them get back on their feet, adding that, “we must not fail them.”
The displacement has left at least 730,000 people in Cabo Delgado with no access to their lands and no means of earning a living.
UN voices deep concern over deaths of protesters in Kingdom of Eswatini
The eruption of violence in the Kingdom of Eswatini in recent days is deeply concerning, amid reports that dozens of people have been killed or injured during protests calling for democratic reforms, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Tuesday.
Unrest first began in the last absolute monarchy in Africa, in May, when students took to the streets to call for accountability for the death of a 25-year-old law student, allegedly at the hands of the police.
In late June, these protests grew into daily pro-democracy marches in several locations around the Kingdom, with protesters voicing deep-seated political and economic grievances.
OHCHR said they’d received allegations of “disproportionate and unnecessary use of force, harassment and intimidation by security forces, including the use of live ammunition by police.
Spokesperson Liz Throssell urged the authorities in Eswatini to “fully adhere to human rights principles in restoring calm and the rule of law, in particular the obligation to minimise any use of force”.
She called on the Government to ensure that there are prompt, transparent, effective, independent and impartial investigations into all allegations of human rights violations.
Iran must stop using long-term detention to silence rights defenders: UN expert
And finally, an independent UN rights expert has criticised Iran’s practice of sentencing human rights defenders to long-term detention, calling on the Government to release all those detained simply for doing their jobs.
“It is too easy for human rights defenders in Iran to find themselves condemned to 10 years or more in prison, for carrying out work that is legitimate in the eyes of human rights law”, said Mary Lawlor, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, in a statement.
Defenders of women, of children, of prisoner rights, of labour rights, of freedom of expression, of minorities, and others – “they all run the risk of being detained in dire conditions for long periods of time,” she said.
When rights defenders are jailed, that means some of the rights of the general population are left unprotected. Human rights defenders perform a vital service in any country, but in Iran, they are accused of harming national security, she noted.
Matt Wells, UN News.
