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Any United Nations peacekeeping mission that takes over from the African Union (AU) in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region will need to work in “partnership” with the country’s people and Government, the head of the recent Security Council mission there said today, while repeating the delegation’s view that such a force was needed to curb the killings in a region that has also seen more than 2 million people displaced.

Following last week’s action by the United Nations Security Council to extend the prohibition of trade in “blood diamonds” from Liberia – gems that are said to fuel conflict in the region – Secretary-General Kofi Annan has reappointed the panel of experts who assess the impact of that sanctions regime.

The total amount of remittances sent home to developing countries by workers abroad reached $173 billion in 2005, $6 billion more than previously estimated, a senior World Bank official today told a United Nations symposium on migration taking place this week in Turin, Italy.

The newly established United Nations Human Rights Council today adopted a landmark treaty to prevent and punish the crime of enforced disappearances, estimated to amount to 40,000 cases from 60 countries, and also the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, legislation that had been debated for 11 years.

The recent upsurge of violence in Iraq over the past four months has uprooted a further 150,000 people across the war-torn country, bringing the total of internally displaced persons (IDPs) to 1.3 million, according to the United Nations mission there.

Seeking to prevent the possible airborne transmission of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases from passenger to passenger on board aircraft, the United Nations health agency today issued updated guidelines to further minimize the risk, stipulating the postponement of long-distance travel by people with infectious TB.

Despite better harvests across southern Africa, more than 3 million people will need over $85-million-worth of urgent international food aid this year because of grinding poverty and the highest rates of HIV/AIDS on earth, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today.

Balkan countries aspiring to join the European Union (EU) must do more to help Roma, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), but assistance must target the whole community or risk isolating these impoverished and marginalized groups further, according to a new United Nations report.

The newly established United Nations Human Rights Council was today called upon to adopt an international convention obliging Governments to prevent and punish the crime of enforced disappearances, estimated to amount to 40,000 cases from 60 countries.

Afghanistan, the world’s largest opium producer, is already a “narco-economy” and risks becoming a “narco-state,” with drug production its largest employer, the top United Nations drugs and crime fighter warned today.