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Joining the chorus of condemnation over the assassination of Hamas leader Abdelaziz Rantissi, the United Nations expert on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions today called on Israel to stop using such tactics in accordance with international law.

With the numbers of women and children coerced into smugglers’ networks reaching into the hundreds of thousands per year, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has voted to appoint a Special Rapporteur on trafficking in human beings to focus on protecting the rights of actual and potential victims.

While over 200 cases remain unresolved, appreciable progress has been made in identifying the remains of Kuwaiti prisoners of war as well as the nationals of other countries who have been missing since the 1990 invasion by Iraq, according to a United Nations report released today.

Describing the chronic hunger faced by more than 800 million people as “the most important humanitarian crisis in the world today,” one of the globe’s more famous students, Lauren Bush, today helped launch a campaign by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to encourage students to participate more in the fight against hunger.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) announced today that its fact-finding mission has been given permission to travel to the troubled Darfur region of western Sudan, where a senior UN official has said there has been an ethnic cleansing campaign against the local black African population.

Former combatants of the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) lined up in an orderly manner to hand over their weapons as the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) launched a disarmament programme today in the West African country’s second city of Buchanan, the UN spokesman said.

An official announcement that Secretary-General Kofi Annan will set up an independent inquiry to look into allegations of corruption in the United Nations Oil-for-Food programme for Iraq is expected on Wednesday, his spokesman confirmed today.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has proposed sending United Nations military and police forces to Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, beginning in the latter half of May as the vanguard of an 8,300-strong United Nations stabilization mission that will take over from the United States-led multilateral interim force (MIF) on 1 June.

Urging the world’s leaders to seize the opportunity to remove landmines forever, the head of the United Nations anti-mine service said today that countries must use a major conference later this year to map out the strategy towards reaching that target.

Some 150 experts, representing 22 linguistic or geographical divisions around the world, gathered today at United Nations Headquarters in New York to encourage the development of more consistency and accuracy in the use of place names, especially on maps and in gazetteers.