One week after Hurricane Matthew slammed into Haiti, United Nations agencies are continuing the massive relief effort under way on the ground, scrambling to fend off the threat of cholera, delivering life-saving supplies and rehabilitating damaged infrastructure, such as schools.
Residents in Pilate, a remote town of some 40,000 inhabitants located on a mountain in northern Haiti, were treated to an unusual site recently: uniformed, foreign men hard at work laying concrete foundations for a well near the local hospital and school.
From a decades-long conflict which has seen an ever-growing number of civilians killed to rooting out corruption among government bodies, Afghanistan has been facing a range of challenges with the international community’s assistance – and many of these topics will be discussed at a two-day gathering starting on Tuesday, 4 October, in the Belgian capital of Brussels.
On 22 August 2014, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that he had appointed Mr. Espen Barth Eide of Norway as his new Special Adviser on Cyprus, replacing Mr. Alexander Downer of Australia, who had stepped down four months earlier, in April.
“A woman of firsts” is perhaps only a summary description of Dame Margaret Anstee, the first woman to serve as a United Nations Under-Secretary-General.
“I took my piano and made it everything: my work, and my studies at university; to teach children music,” begins Aeham Ahmad, in an interview with United Nations Radio, ahead of a UN summit on large movements of refugees and migrants on 19 September 2016.
On 15 June 2015, the United Nations General Assembly elected Mogens Lykketoft – a Danish national – to serve as the President of its seventieth session. At the time of his election, Mr. Lykketoft was the Speaker (President) of the Danish Parliament, a position he had held since 2011. Born on 9 January 1946, it was a fitting coincidence that he would turn 70 during his term as President of the 70th Session of the UN General Assembly– a personal fact he highlighted during his acceptance speech to the world body upon his election.
Halima, aged 22, is from the village of Yei in South Sudan. Now, though, Yei is only a name, and a distant dream for her and her four children. Bidi Bidi: she will have to get used to that, as the new name for her new home. Bidi Bidi. Besides this name and its new beats, she will learn new names, of new neighbours, too. Her husband is not here with her; he was shot dead two weeks ago, when her village was attacked.
Adopted 20 years ago by the United Nations General Assembly, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) has not yet got into effect, and will only come into force once ratified by eight specific countries that have not done it yet.
Noting that national policies often tend to treat women and girls with disabilities as helpless objects of pity or allow them to be treated in that manner, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has stressed that, instead, they need to be empowered and allowed to enjoy their fundamental rights and freedoms, as any other person.
