Urgent action is needed to avoid a repeat of tragedies like this week’s drowning of at least 27 people in the English Channel, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said on Thursday.
Amid growing concerns about the plight of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers at the Poland-Belarus border, the UN rights office and UN refugee agency on Friday urged all parties to respect human rights and refrain from using them for political ends.
The UN Human Rights High Commissioner has urged Belarus and Poland to urgently resolve the burgeoning migrant crisis on their mutual border, where thousands of people have gathered in an attempt to enter the European Union (EU).
With news footage showing migrants on the border between Belarus and Poland attempting to dodge teargas and make their way through razor wire, UN agencies called for an “immediate de-escalation”, following weeks of rising tension.
While women in Belarus overall are being denied rights and freedoms, female political activists are subjected to enforced disappearances, torture, ill-treatment and exile, an independent UN human rights expert told the General Assembly on Tuesday.
At least eight people have died along the border between Belarus and the European Union, where multiple groups of asylum-seekers, refugees and migrants have been stranded for weeks in increasingly dire conditions.
Tensions over vehicle licence plates and anti-smuggling operations, between authorities in Kosovo and Serbia, in recent weeks, may contribute to unravelling “steady but fragile progress made in rebuilding trust among communities” in Kosovo and Serbia.
A farmer in the central European country, Georgia, has been sharing her lifetime of knowledge with other women farmers in the region, saying that “there is nothing in agriculture that a man can do and a woman can’t.”
The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and migration agency IOM, called on Tuesday for an immediate investigation into the deaths of four people near the border between Poland and Belarus, due to causes yet to be determined.
