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With donations to its emergency fund for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) having fallen off, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today said it would have to stop distributing rations to nearly 4 million people over the next two months.

A United Nations-backed forum today wrapped up its meeting in the Republic of Korea by adopting a declaration calling on world governments to implement measures to increase civic participation in and the transparency of their operations.

The General Assembly today officially elected former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres as the 10th United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

With human rights observance being one of the central goals of the United Nations, Human Rights High Commissioner Louise Arbour today outlined a strategic vision for the future and called for tools to increase her office’s global leadership and its engagement with individual countries.

Despite the growth in Palestinian domestic output in 2004 after four years of recession, the unemployment rate in the occupied territories is almost 26 per cent, with less than half of the men of working age and only 10 per cent of women employed, the United Nations labour agency says.

The number of Togolese fleeing post-election disputes continues to rise steadily, now totalling more than 34,000, with all the new arrivals this week going to Benin, the United Nations refugee agency said today.

Responding to a humanitarian crisis among some 20,000 displaced persons in a remote province of Colombia, the United Nations refugee agency, together with the Colombian Government, has launched an emergency campaign to provide them identity documents as a first step toward gaining access to relief.

The United Nations refugee agency is winding down its repatriation of Angolans with a final convoy from the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today and it is also sending home the last convoy from eastern Ethiopia to north-western Somalia tomorrow.

Over half of asylum applicants in Italy whose cases were examined on their merits in 2004 were judged to be in need of international protection, the United Nations refugee agency said today.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum today for a visit that will also take him to the troubled Darfur region, a day after he urged donors to help an African-led peacekeeping mission scale up its operations there.