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With Iraq's constitutional referendum just three days away, the top United Nations envoy in the country has stressed the importance of the vote taking place in an atmosphere free from fear and intimidation.

As helicopters of the United Nations peacekeeping mission remained grounded in Eritrea for the eighth straight day, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General today said a meeting with a senior Eritrean official had shed no light on why the flight ban was imposed or when it might be lifted.

Momentum generated by the United Nations World Conference against Racism four years ago is fuelling a trend towards reporting and monitoring, often using statistics, of racist crimes and incidents, Secretary-General Kofi Annan says in his latest report on the issue to the General Assembly.

With the United Nations landmark Headquarters on New York’s East River in urgent need of renovation for structural, security and safety reasons, New York State’s rejection of original temporary relocation plans threatens to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the final bill, the official in charge of the overhaul said today.

Reported information about continued serious human rights violations in Turkmenistan indicates a lack of overall improvement in this area, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan says in a new report to the General Assembly.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Special Representative for Somalia will visit Moscow and Stockholm this week in his effort to find a peaceful solution to differences within the Somali Transitional Federal Institutions (TFIs), including strongly held views on where they should be based.

Voicing hope that young people will continue the age-old struggle to strengthen human rights and the rule of law for all, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said the recent UN summit achieved a historic breakthrough when the world's political leaders agreed that every government has the responsibility to protect its population.

The United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) today said the situation in the country’s Darfur region remains tense, marked by unconfirmed reports of clashes between government forces and the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and attacks on villages.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan congratulated Liberians today for the peaceful and orderly manner in which they turned out to vote yesterday in their historic first post-war election after 16 years of conflict.

Marking the United Nations Day for Disaster Reduction, the UN University (UNU) today called on the international community to recognize the plight of people who are displaced not by dramatic disasters but by gradual negative changes in the environment.