Panama is setting up a network to promote corporate responsibility modelled on an initiative championed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to challenge businesses around the world to act upon a set of universally recognized principles.

With worldwide anxiety over homeland security prompting governments to rethink their national immigration and asylum guidelines, the United Nations refugee agency today voiced concern that a new United States policy requiring mandatory detention of asylum-seekers based on nationality unjustly targets persons who themselves are fleeing conflict and human suffering.

Guatemala today became the twentieth country to deposit its instrument of ratification for a United Nations treaty safeguarding the core rights of migrant workers and their families, giving the accord the force of international law.

Two landlocked South American countries and the neighbours who separate them from the sea opened a meeting in Paraguay today, the first of the regional sessions ahead of a United Nations conference on ways to facilitate trade and transit for the world's 30 developing countries that have no access to the coast.