The Security Council today condemned the 8 January attack targeting the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which wounded two peacekeepers and damaged their vehicle.
Stressing that transparency is a precondition for accountability, the head of the United Nations internal oversight office today spotlighted the steps being taken to bolster the Organization’s capacity to investigate allegations of fraud and corruption.
This year, the United Nations will put itself on a new track to tackle the obstacles it faces – ranging from development to health to terrorism – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said.
While security and political conditions in Côte d’Ivoire have improved in recent months, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has cautioned that these are fragile gains given the slow progress in achieving key benchmarks of last year’s peace agreement, including dismantling militias.
Some 151,000 Iraqis died from violence between March 2003 – start of the United States-led invasion – and June 2006, according to a large national household survey conducted by the Iraqi Government and the United Nations World health Organization (WHO).
The top United Nations peacekeeping official today warned the Security Council that the new, critically under-manned and under-equipped mission in Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region faced “probably the greatest risk” to a UN operation in more than a decade.
The latest round of United Nations-led discussions on Western Sahara wrapped up today, with Morocco and the Frente Polisario agreeing on the need to move into a more intensive and substantive phase of negotiations.
The United Nations has authorized $7 million from its Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to support relief efforts in the aftermath of the post-electoral violence that tore through Kenya last week resulting in the displacement of some 255,000 people.
Although the global economy will continue to grow in 2008, a new United Nations report launched today warned that this expansion is under threat, mainly by the slowdown of the United States economy.
Hailing the third anniversary of the peace accord that ended two decades of civil war in southern Sudan, the United Nations today called on all parties to resolve outstanding issues, including redeployment of forces and demarcation of the North-South boundary.