Latest News

In a bid to secure the widest possible consensus for the new United Nations Human Rights Council, General Assembly President Jan Eliasson has postponed from today until early next week a plenary meeting on what Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called an essential element in reforming the world organization.

With Pakistan starting today to close relief camps for nearly 150,000 survivors of last October’s devastating earthquake as winter draws to an end, the United Nations refugee agency called on the authorities to ensure that all returns to home areas are voluntary and informed.

With the number of visitors to United Nations Headquarters in New York rising by 14 per cent last year to more than 412,000, a new group of multilingual guides, including one in sign language, is set to join a select band that has shown over 38 million people around the landmark building on the East River since 1952.

Increased banditry and a lack of water are forcing the United Nations refugee agency to relocate more than 16,000 people who fled Darfur, Sudan, for eastern Chad to a camp further away from the border.

Executives from five of the world’s leading corporations will accompany a senior official from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) next week to East Africa and the continent’s Great Lakes region to see the agency’s work for hundreds of thousands of people forced to flee their homes, and to explore closer ties between the business and humanitarian communities.

As the United Nation’s envoy to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today welcomed the setting of a date for the first-ever general election there, the top UN peacekeeping official met with leaders in the eastern part of the country on establishing stability in the region.

Seeking to lift hundreds of millions of people out of grinding poverty, representatives of 96 member countries of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today ended a four-day conference on agrarian reform by acknowledging its essential role in promoting sustainable development of the planet.

Training exercises are to be conducted worldwide over the next few months to set up rapid reaction teams of experts to help put measures in place to slow and stop the potential spread of a lethal human bird flu epidemic, a senior United Nations health official said today.

The United Nations top envoy to Kosovo today welcomed the election of a new government by the province’s Assembly.

Welcoming the decision of the African Union (AU) to extend its peacekeeping force in the troubled Darfur region of Sudan, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today urged all States to support the operation while planning for a handover of responsibilities to the United Nations.