This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

Guterres condemns attack on UN blue helmets as possible ‘war crime’

The UN Secretary-General has strongly condemned as a possible war crime the attack on the Organization’s peacekeepers in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which claimed the lives of three soldiers on Tuesday.

In addition to the deaths of two police officers from India and a blue helmet from Morocco, an Egyptian police worker was also injured when a violent demonstration erupted at the UN Mission’s base in Butembo, North Kivu province.

Violence against multiple United Nations bases in North Kivu has increased in recent days; video footage has shown individuals and groups forcing their way in before looting and setting fire to UN residences.

In a statement, UN chief António Guterres said that he regretted the loss of life of demonstrators linked to these events; he also affirmed that the UN Mission in DRC, which is known as MONUSCO, remained committed to work with the authorities to investigate these incidents.

Türkiye risks backtracking on women’s rights, says top rights expert

Türkiye is at a crossroads on women’s rights which could set back efforts to tackle gender-based violence in the country, a top UN-appointed independent rights expert said on Wednesday.

The warning from UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, follows President Recep Erdogan’s announcement in March that Türkiye was pulling out of   the problem, on 1 July.

These included the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, also known as the Istanbul Convention, so-named as Türkiye was first to sign the agreement in 2011.

The Special Rapporteur said that “almost all stakeholders” she had met in Türkiye unequivocally recognised the importance of the Convention in combating violence against women and girls, before insisting that it was “intrinsically linked” to Türkiye’s “identity, aspirations, and its destined role and standing regionally and beyond”.

For those reasons the independent rights expert who reports to the Human Rights Council urged Türkiye to “reconsider” its decision to pull out of the Istanbul Convention, and continue to uphold its other international rights obligations.

FAO warns that 90 per cent of Earth’s topsoil under threat by 2050

A full 90 per cent of the Earth’s precious topsoil is likely to be at risk by 2050, that’s according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO.

In a bid to protect soil globally and help farmers, the FAO warned on Wednesday that the equivalent of one soccer pitch of earth erodes every five seconds.

It also takes around a thousand years to create just a few centimetres of topsoil and to help land restoration, the UN agency urged greater action by countries and partners who’ve signed up to the Global Soil Partnership over the last decade.

The five key actions that FAO has called for include “recarbonising” land, which makes soils healthier by increasing the amount of organic matter they contain.

Costa Rica and Mexico have signed up to the scheme and trained farmers in the use of best practices which include using so-called “cover crops” that prevent erosion, along with crop rotation and tree planting.

Daniel Johnson, UN News.