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Having announced previously that the return of the United Nations to Iraq depends on the country’s security and stability, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was concerned that today’s deadly car bombings in Basra were an indication that violence was spreading.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan today announced the formation of the independent panel that will conduct an inquiry into allegations of impropriety in the administration and management of the Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme.

A fact-finding team from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has left Geneva for Sudan to investigate the situation in the country's Darfur region, where it is alleged that Arab militias have conducted an ethnic cleansing campaign against the local black African population.

Some 26 inmates at a detention centre in Kosovo have begun a hunger strike to protest delays in the hearing of appeals of two men found guilty of war crimes, a spokesman for the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) said today.

Nearly two-thirds of women of child-bearing age in marital or consensual unions use contraception, with the highest percentage found in Latin America and the Caribbean and the lowest in Africa, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) says.

The mandate of the United Nations human rights expert who records and tries to help correct violations of the rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people has been renewed for another three years by the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Citing security concerns in the Afghan-Pakistani border area and improved economic opportunities in Afghanistan, the United Nations refugee agency will close 13 camps by September and encourage their 200,000 Afghan residents to return home.

Following an urgent appeal last week for more funds to prepare for the return of an estimated 150,000 Liberian war refugees this year, the United Nations refugee agency announced today that it had received an additional $11 million from the United States but was still $25 million short of its goal.

The right of children to education is being seriously undermined in dozens of countries by contradictory laws that allow them to work, be married or held criminally responsible at an age when they are legally bound to be in school, according to a new United Nations report launched today.

Asian countries are set to sign an agreement at a United Nations meeting next week in Shanghai that will set up a 140,000-kilometre network of roads linking St. Petersburg to Singapore and Seoul to Istanbul that supporters hope will spur economic development across the continent.