This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

With women and girls excluded, UN rights chief asks ‘what’s next for Afghanistan?’

UN rights chief Volker Türk has condemned the Taliban’s “shocking” and “cruel” oppression of Afghan women and girls, which together with a severe humanitarian crisis, is jeopardising the country’s entire future.

Addressing the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, Mr. Türk said that human rights in Afghanistan were “in a state of collapse”.

He also deplored the “devastating precedent” set by Afghanistan as the only country in the world where women and girls are denied access to secondary and higher education. 

Here’s Mr. Türk now, reacting to the “long list of misogynistic restrictions” confining the country’s women to a life indoors:

“What can possibly come next? Any prospect of a stable, prosperous future for Afghanistan rests on the participation of half of the population.

“Denying women and girls’ rights to participate in daily and public life not only denies them their human rights, it denies Afghanistan the benefit of the contributions they have to offer.” 

24 million more could face emergency levels of hunger: WFP

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said on Tuesday that a historic funding shortfall was forcing it to “drastically” cut rations in most of its operations, potentially pushing an additional 24 million people to the brink of starvation.

The funding gap of over 60 per cent is the highest in WFP’s history.

The UN agency said that “massive reductions” have already been implemented in almost half of its operations, including hunger hotspots such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Jordan, Palestine, South Sudan, Somalia and Syria.

WFP’s chief economist Arif Husain highlighted a massive jump in needs which started with the COVID pandemic and was compounded by the war in Ukraine. 

Some 345 million people in the world already face acute food insecurity; this includes 40 million suffering emergency levels of hunger and at risk of dying from malnutrition.

Resources from traditional donors are insufficient while lower-income countries that are buckling under the burden of their debt struggle to support their populations, Mr. Husain said.

US-Mexico border is ‘world’s deadliest’ migration land route: IOM

Desperate migrants are increasingly putting their lives at risk while attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico in search of a better life.

The latest findings from the UN migration agency (IOM) show that 686 migrants died or disappeared on the US-Mexico border in 2022, making it the deadliest land route for migrants worldwide on record.

Nearly half of these deaths were linked to the hazardous crossing of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, IOM said, adding that many more deaths were likely to go unrecorded due to a lack of data from official sources. 

Other concerning trends recorded in the Americas included a more than 42 per cent increase in deaths on migration routes in the Caribbean last year and the continuing dramatic situation at the Darien Gap.

This particularly dangerous jungle border crossing between Panama and Colombia saw 141 documented migrant deaths in 2022. 

The UN agency revealed that according to its surveys of people who attempted the Darien Gap crossing, one in 25 reported that someone they were traveling with had gone missing. 

IOM stressed that countries needed to act on the data “to ensure (that) safe, regular migration routes are accessible”.

Dominika Tomaszewska-Mortimer, UN News.