UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet on Monday urged UN Member States to promote a more inclusive post-pandemic recovery to help the world’s most vulnerable recover from the impact of COVID.

The growing use of weaponised drones risks destabilising global peace and security and creating a “drone power club” among nations, that face no effective accountability for deploying them as part of their “war on terror”, a senior UN-appointed independent rights expert said on Thursday.

The UN’s top rights official, Michelle Bachelet, is to spearhead efforts to address systemic racism against people of African descent by law enforcement agencies, the Human Rights Council decided on Friday. The resolution – decided unanimously without a vote - follows a rare Urgent Debate in the Council earlier in the week, requested by the African group of nations, following the death of George Floyd in the US state of Minnesota.

This Thursday, we cover: the dire humanitarian situation in Syria’s Idlib; living conditions at the US-Mexico border denounced by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF); trachoma-related blindness on the verge of being eliminated; and updates from the Human Rights Council in Geneva.