Latest News

Oscar-winning actress and United Nations refugee agency Special Envoy, Angelina Jolie, travelled yesterday to Myanmar’s Kachin state, where internally displaced persons (IDPs), including a number of women, told her their stories.

Having achieved its “core objective” of scaling up global action to tackle the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response will officially wind down today, transferring its role to the World Health Organization (WHO), which just announced that an experimental vaccine being tested in Guinea appears to be highly effective and could be a “game changer.”

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has engaged in widespread and systematic human rights violations of the most serious kinds in Syria and Iraq, brutally forcing some 8 million people to “assimilate, flee or face death,” according to a United Nations expert.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned today that the more than 70,000 Liberian children whose births were not recorded during the Ebola outbreak may be unable to access basic health and social services, obtain identity documents, and risk the danger of being trafficked or illegally adopted.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the UN special envoy on the Middle East have strongly condemned today's arson attack in the West Bank that killed a Palestinian child and left the child's parents severely injured.

The Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voiced deep concern today over the reported killing of two Iraqi journalists in Mosul.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today praised a Paraguayan man whose “profound vision that the forces of animosity and hatred in our world are no match for the power of the human spirit” led to the creation of the International Day of Friendship, which falls on July 30 every year.

Thirteen additional countries need to ratify an agreement brokered by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to combat illegal fishing by blocking ports to ships known or believed to be carrying illicit catches that account for more than 15 per cent of global output, the agency said today.

Recognizing that wild animals and plants are an “irreplaceable part of the natural systems of the Earth,” the United Nations General Assembly today urged its Member States to take decisive steps to prevent, combat and eradicate the illegal trade in wildlife, “on both the supply and demand sides.”

The Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has been tasked with reinvigorating an inclusive political process towards ending the crisis in the country, based on the aims set out in the 2012 Geneva Communiqué, which was adopted by the first international conference on the issue and has been endorsed by the UN security Council.