In mid-May, just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Yemen, funding for UNFPA’s life-saving reproductive health services dried up. The agency has been forced to suspend the provision of reproductive healthcare in 140 out of the 180 health facilities, it supports, meaning only 40 now remain.
A plane chartered by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) landed at Sana’a airport on Saturday with lifesaving supplies to help curb the spread of COVID-19 in conflict-torn Yemen.
In countries suffering from conflict, readjusting to life in a peaceful society is a challenge, both for former fighters and the wider community. Since the spread of the COVID-19 crisis, the UN is having to refocus many of its programmes, aimed at reducing violence in communities, and rehabilitating combatants.
To honour the more than 3,900 women and men who have lost their lives under the UN flag since 1948, Secretary-General António Guterres laid a wreath at the Peacekeepers’ memorial on Friday, International Day of UN Peacekeepers.
Thirty countries and numerous international partners have underlined the need to make tests, treatments and other technologies to fight COVID-19, available to people everywhere.
The UN human rights office (OHCHR) has welcomed steps taken by social media companies to prevent their platforms from being used to promote hatred, violence and misinformation, Spokesperson Rupert Colville said on Friday.
Shocked over the killing last weekend of five men in Nepal, who had planned to escort home one of their girlfriends from a higher caste, the UN human rights chief on Friday stressed that ending caste-based discrimination is “fundamental” to the overall sustainable development vision of leaving no one behind.
Tobacco products continue to kill eight million people a year who get hooked via a $9 billion a year marketing strategy. That’s the warning from the UN World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday, which has said that even during a global pandemic, the tobacco and nicotine industry has continued to promote products that limit people’s ability to fight new coronavirus and recover from the disease.
The UN human rights chief on Thursday condemned the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd while in police custody in the city of Minneapolis, calling it the latest in “a long line of killings of unarmed African Americans by US police officers and members of the public”.
Some 14 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean could experience severe food insecurity this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to projections released on Thursday by the World Food Programme (WFP).
