At least eight people have died along the border between Belarus and the European Union, where multiple groups of asylum-seekers, refugees and migrants have been stranded for weeks in increasingly dire conditions.
The European Union has been at the forefront of international cooperation to defeat “the same common enemy”, COVID-19, the President of the European Council, told the UN General Assembly on Friday.
Rules-based international order is under “great strain,” Donald Tusk, President of the European Council of the European Union (EU), told the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, saying that his organization is “fighting intensely” to preserve it.
The challenge for political leaders attending a summit on migration hosted by France on Monday will be to give people options other than having to trust smugglers, the UN has said.
IOM, the UN migration agency, made the comments as representatives of Germany, Spain and Italy gathered in Paris, along with the leaders of Chad, Niger and Libya.
The African states are transit countries for those seeking to reach Europe, where more than 120,000 migrants have arrived so far by sea in 2017, according to IOM.
There has been a “dramatic increase” in food insecurity around the world the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Friday.
FAO was one of the UN agencies contributing to a new report on food crises, along with the European Union (EU), the United States development agency USAID, and others.
Around 108 million people were categorized as “severely food insecure” during 2016, compared with 80 million the previous year.
Refugees who have fled to Europe from countries like Syria and Afghanistan are still being portrayed as “potential terrorists”, especially on social media, while so-called “hate speech” is on the rise.
That’s according to Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser , the High Representative of the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), a group of experts who explore the roots of social and cultural polarization.
“Unnecessarily slow and challenging.”
That’s how the implementation of a European Union (EU) agreement to relocate thousands of asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy to other countries on the continent has been described by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
The agency says effective relocation is critical to increasing European solidarity and responsibility in addressing refugee and migrant flows.
Dianne Penn has the story.
Duration: 2'21"
The success of the Syria peace talks is crucial for the people of the war-torn country and for everyone in Europe, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said, in a surprise announcement at the UN on Wednesday.
Standing side by side with UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura in Geneva, where negotiations are taking place, Ms Mogherini said she was present to try to “consolidate and accelerate the process.”
Concern at “never-ending flow” of vulnerable EU arrivals
Hopes that the colder weather might see a drop in the number of people risking their lives to reach Europe have proved groundless after the UN Children’s Agency, UNICEF, on Wednesday said that the number of women and children seeking safety has doubled in a month.
The warning comes after the UN agency reported that in October, more than 41,000 women and children crossed from Greece to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, out of a total of nearly 93,000 people.