A top United Nations envoy has encouraged Nepalese parties to work productively to advance the country’s fragile peace process and create the conditions to permit the world body to wind up its work there.
Senior United Nations official Hédi Annabi, lauded by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a “true citizen of the world” and a “mild man with the heart of a lion,” was laid to rest in the soil of his Tunisian homeland today, nine days after he died in the rubble of Haiti’s devastating earthquake.
A team of United Nations staff dealing with human rights and displacement is headed to quake-hit Haiti today to assess a range of protection issues in the wake of the disaster that has left one third of the country’s 9 million inhabitants in need of urgent assistance.
As relief efforts continue in the wake of the devastating quake which struck Haiti last week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today emphasized the need to rebuild the impoverished Caribbean nation and “turn disaster into opportunity.”
Northern Kosovo remains a flashpoint amid continuing tensions between Kosovo Serb and Kosovo Albanian communities there despite a greater understanding over reconstruction of destroyed housing by the communities, the top United Nation official there said today.
The parties to the 2005 peace accord that ended Sudan’s north-south civil war have made important breakthroughs, but a return to violence is still a very real possibility, warns a new United Nations report.
Veteran Nigerian diplomat Ibrahim Gambari, who most recently served as top United Nations envoy for Myanmar, arrived in Sudan today to assume his new duties as Joint Special Representative and head of the joint African Union-UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID).
The so-called ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill’ under consideration by the Ugandan Parliament not only violates the fundamental human rights of Ugandans, but will also impede efforts to combat HIV, a United Nations independent expert warned today.
