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United Nations officials in Sudan have strongly condemned a deadly attack at the weekend on a village in the south of the country that has claimed dozens of lives and is the latest in a series of ethnically-based attacks against civilians that have provoked mounting international concern.

A United Nations human rights expert today said he was distressed at the current spate of xenophobic attacks on foreigners and ethnic minorities in South Africa, which has claimed the lives of 56 people.

United Nations relief agencies are distributing aid and working to protect the most vulnerable migrants in South Africa, which has experienced days of violent and xenophobic attacks against foreigners.

After ten days of violent attacks on foreign nationals, migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers living in some of the country’s informal settlements, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is helping the hardest-hit cities of Johannesburg, Ekhuruleni and Tshwane to provide emergency relief supplies to vulnerable women and children.

More than 100,000 people who fled the decades-long civil war in southern Sudan have returned home to restart their lives in a repatriation programme that began after the signing of a 2005 peace agreement, the United Nations refugee agency said today.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has begun assisting the Government of South Sudan in its prison reform process in the agency’s first project in the region as it emerges from a decades-long civil war.

South Africa has made great efforts to redress housing inequality but desperate living conditions persist, according to a United Nations human rights expert who today called on the country’s Government to boost social services and take other measures to improve all settlements.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced today that a South African university centre established during the apartheid era has been awarded its biennial prize for human rights education.

Medical staff and supplies are urgently needed to step-up treatment to those wounded by the fighting in Malakal, South Sudan, where several hundred soldiers and civilians were injured during two days of fighting late last month, the United Nations reported today.

Wrapping up his visit to South Africa today, Secretary-General Kofi Annan conferred with former President Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg and toured Soweto, where he laid a wreath at a memorial for one of the first victims of the uprising in that township 30 years ago.