Following complaints by two French Muslim women, fined for wearing a full-body veil or niqab, a UN Committee of independent human rights experts ruled in their favour on Tuesday, stating that their freedom to practice their religion had been infringed.
With more than 7,000 Central-American refugees now on the march through Mexico towards the southern border of the United States in search of safety and work, all countries involved are being urged by the UN to liaise with key agencies on the ground providing support.
The UN is committed to recognizing the rights of victims of sexual exploitation by UN personnel but, when it comes to preventing and responding to abuse, there is a still “a long way to go, and many challenges to overcome,” says the UN’s first-ever Victims’ Rights Advocate Jane Connors.
The case of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi is just the latest example of a “new and very worrying practice” of States abducting individuals beyond their own borders, said the Chair of the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, addressing the UN General Assembly on Thursday.
Every four days, a journalist is murdered, often for simply doing their job of uncovering something that someone wants to stay hidden: the vast majority of these killings go unpunished.
Hundreds of civilians who were taken by opposition forces in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria region during an uptick in fighting are still missing, the UN’s top rights official said on Thursday, in a call for their immediate release.
In August, Michelle Bachelet, twice-elected President of Chile and the first head of UN Women, was confirmed as the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, replacing Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.
United Nations human rights chief Michele Bachelet said on Wednesday that she was open to an independent, UN-led investigation into the fate of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if joint efforts by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, fail to uncover the facts.
A group of United Nations agencies has issued a joint statement calling for a ban on tests meant to assess the virginity of a girl or a woman, which is a common practice in at least 20 countries.
