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News in Brief 17 January 2022

News in Brief 17 January 2022

This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

Tonga volcanic eruption: still too soon to say just how bad it was

Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, is covered in ash and dust after the submarine volcanic eruption at the weekend, but the situation is calm there and first clean-up efforts are being made, UN humanitarians said on Monday.

Further afield in the Pacific island nation, an update from aid coordinating office OCHA indicated that there has been significant damage to infrastructure around the main island of Tongatapu, where several resorts have been destroyed or badly damaged, in western coastal areas.

There are no confirmed fatalities so far, but two people are still missing, and assessments are still pending, particularly from the outer islands.

According to reports, Saturday’s eruption was heard as far away as Alaska, while the tsunami that emanated from the blast flooded the Japanese and US coastlines, also killing two people in Peru.

So far in Tonga, no official contact has been established with two small low-lying islands Mango and Fonoi, although surveillance flights by New Zealand and Australia have revealed substantial damage along western beaches.

Taliban overseeing ‘collective punishment’ of women and girls

The Taliban in Afghanistan is institutionalizing “large-scale…systematic” discrimination and violence against women and girls, UN-appointed independent  human rights experts have warned.

The alert follows the Taliban takeover last August, which has seen a series of restrictive measures against women and girls that amount to “collective punishment”.

These include imposing a strict dress code, barring women from returning to their jobs and requiring a male relative to accompany them in public spaces.

There’s particular concern about the continued denial of access to secondary and tertiary education, on the premise that women and men have to be segregated and that female students abide by a specific dress code.

Religious or linguistic minorities such as the Hazara, Tajik, Hindu and other communities have also become more vulnerable in Afghanistan, the experts said, highlighting reports of extrajudicial killings, “which would suggest deliberate efforts to target, ban, and even eliminate them from the country”.

The result of the de facto leadership’s policies is that women – and particularly female heads of household - are now struggling to make a living and being pushed further into poverty, the experts insisted.

As the dire humanitarian crisis continues in Afghanistan, the rights experts noted that any aid “response, recovery or development efforts” would be sure to fail if female relief staff, women-led organizations, and women in general continued to be excluded from the process.

Horn of Africa facing major threat to food security after drought, locusts: FAO

To the Horn of Africa now, where the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has appealed for more than $138 million in urgent funding to help 1.5 million people.

Rural communities are particularly vulnerable because their fields and pasture have been hit hard by an extended drought.

The region is prone to food insecurity, weather extremes, natural resource limitations and conflict, and FAO said on Monday that the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020-21 locust infestation have stretched the coping capacities of rural communities to the limit.

The worry is that a third season of drought driven by La Niña could spark a large-scale hunger crisis, if the region’s food producing rural communities do not receive adequate assistance ahead of upcoming agricultural seasons.

The worst-affected countries are Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, where projections indicate that more than 25 million people face high acute food insecurity by mid-2022.

Daniel Johnson, UN News.

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  • Tonga volcanic eruption update from UN humanitarians
  • Taliban in Afghanistan overseeing ‘collective punishment’ of women, girls: UN rights experts
  • Horn of Africa facing major threat to food security after drought, locusts- FAO
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Daniel Johnson, UN News - Geneva
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