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An international treaty banning the world's most dangerous pesticides, industrial chemicals and hazardous by-products of combustion will enter into force on 17 May now that 50 countries have ratified the pact, the United Nations announced today.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) will soon take steps towards the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as part of the country’s political transition, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country (MONUC) said today.

A new report on staffing at the United Nations shows women catching up with men in terms of the number of those recruited, but females still hold lower-level jobs.

The events of 2003 have underlined the pressing need to make the United Nations as effective as possible in tackling poverty and other threats to global security, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told a gathering of ambassadors to the UN today.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) today announced that it will hold three days of hearings starting Monday in the request for an advisory opinion on the consequences of the construction of a wall in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Last year Afghanistan produced its highest amount of opium since 1999 – an estimated 3,600 tons, or more than three-quarters of the global supply – and the country is poised to exceed that amount this year, according to the results of a United Nations survey released today.

The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency will visit Libya at the beginning of next week to review progress in verifying that all of the North African country's nuclear activities are placed under safeguards and designed exclusively for peaceful purposes.

The United Nations refugee agency is mounting an emergency airlift to eastern Chad this week to bring more than 256 tons of aid supplies to 110,000 Sudanese refugees currently scattered along a 600-kilometre stretch of remote borderland.

The heads of all five United Nations peace missions in West Africa will meet later this week in a bid to harmonize the UN’s policies and activities in the region, pulling together common assets across the area and exploiting synergies among the operations to achieve greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

In a bid to boost consumer safety, a recent United Nations meeting on the fishing trade has called for the establishment of cost-effective and global standards to trace a fish’s progress through trade networks from capture to consumption.