Category Archives: United Nations

Calls for investigation into mysterious death of Italian UN monitor in Colombia

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  • Doubts over claim that Mario Paciolla, 33, killed himself
  • Mayor of Naples joins calls for truth and justice

The mayor of Naples has joined human rights groups in calling for “truth and justice” following the death of an Italian United Nations volunteer who had been on a peace mission in Colombia.

Mario Paciolla, 33, from Naples, was found dead on 15 July at his home in San Vicente de Caguán, a town in Colombia’s southern jungle long used as a strategic rearguard for rebel groups and drug traffickers.

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Cost of preventing next pandemic ‘equal to just 2% of Covid-19 economic damage’

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World must act now to protect wildlife in order to stop future virus crises, say scientists

The cost of preventing further pandemics over the next decade by protecting wildlife and forests would equate to just 2% of the estimated financial damage caused by Covid-19, according to a new analysis.

Two new viruses a year had spilled from their wildlife hosts into humans over the last century, the researchers said, with the growing destruction of nature meaning the risk today is higher than ever.

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The Guardian view on population growth: a small planet needs big solutions | Editorial

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New research suggests that the global peak may be lower than expected. But the challenges will still be immense

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrung his hands as he contemplated the growing mass of humanity, warning: “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

A few years after he wrote that essay, the global population hit 1 billion. Now, thanks to the exponential growth which he described, it is closing in on 8 billion. The scholar’s direst warnings, echoed by others through the years, have not come to pass. But his concerns about the strain on resources have been multiplied by the climate crisis, with greenhouse gas emissions rising, and global heating in turn causing land loss and deterioration.

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‘Open your eyes’: Yemen on brink of famine again, UN agencies warn

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Millions face devastating hunger if relief efforts are not stepped up in a country ravaged by war, locusts and now Covid-19

Yemen is in danger of an imminent return to devastating levels of hunger and food insecurity, according to new analysis released by UN agencies.

The World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Unicef say that the percentage of the population predicted to face acute food insecurity in southern areas of the country will rise from 25% to 40% by the end of the year.

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UN chief slams ‘myths, delusions and falsehoods’ around inequality

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António Guterres uses Mandela lecture to call for radical shake-up of IMF and World Bank in wake of coronavirus pandemic

The UN secretary general will today deliver one of his most stinging speeches to date, attacking the “myths, delusions and falsehoods” around international progress on equality.

In an unusually strongly worded speech, António Guterres urged major reform to the UN security council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to address systemic inequalities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Oil spill from Yemen tanker ‘would be four times worse then Exxon Valdez’ – UN

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Spill from decaying vessel could wreck environment and livelihoods for decades

Time is running out to prevent a disastrous oil spill from a deteriorating tanker loaded with 1.1m barrels of crude that is moored off the coast of Yemen, the UN’s environment chief has said.

Inger Andersen told the UN security council that a spill from the FSO Safer, which has had no maintenance for more than five years, would wreck ecosystems and livelihoods for decades.

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Migrant workers in Qatar face ‘structural racism’ says UN report

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World Cup host heavily criticised over discrimination and ‘coercive conditions’ experienced by labourers from south Asia and Africa

The United Nations has raised “serious concerns of structural racial discrimination against non-nationals” in World Cup host nation Qatar, in a highly critical report to be presented to the UN human rights council this week.

The report, by the UN’s special rapporteur for racism, Tendayi Achiume, is notable for its uncompromising language, saying a “de facto caste system based on national origin” exists in Qatar, “according to which European, North American, Australian and Arab nationalities systematically enjoy greater human rights protections than South Asian and sub-Saharan African nationalities”.

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‘You simply die all over again’: the agony of Srebrenica, 25 years on

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The women who lost loved ones in the massacre of Bosnian Muslims are still burying bodies – and still seeking justice as the guilty walk free

In 2012, Munira Subašić identified the man who had transported her son to his death; a high-level official in Srebrenica’s police department.

Subašić vividly recalls their previous fateful encounter: it was July 1995, and tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled Srebrenica as it fell to Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladić. Subašić, along with dozens of her family members, sought protection at a battery factory in nearby Potočari, where a Dutch battalion of UN peacekeepers was stationed.

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‘We will haunt you’: survivors mark 25th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre – video report

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Bosnia is marking the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were executed in July 1995.

The recently identified remains of nine victims were reburied in a memorial cemetery outside the town in eastern Bosnia; almost 7,000 of those killed have been buried here but further victims are still being found and identified.

The Srebrenica massacre is the only declared genocide in Europe since the second world war, but is being subjected to a growing chorus of denial

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I prosecuted Srebrenica war criminals, but I know others are still walking free | Serge Brammertz

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Until we bring all the genocide’s perpetrators to justice, we are again failing the boys and men massacred in Bosnia in July 1995

  • Serge Brammertz was the chief prosecutor of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia from 2008 until its closure in 2017

This Saturday, like every 11 July on the anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, the remains of newly identified victims will be buried alongside the thousands already interred at the cemetery and memorial site in the Bosnian town. The bodies of Almir Halilović, Sakib Kiverić, Emin Mustafić and Fuad Ðozić, who died in the 1995 slaughter, will not, however, be among them.

Twenty-five years ago, senior Bosnian Serb leaders committed genocide against Srebrenica’s Bosnian Muslims. The town had been designated a UN safe area. But Bosnian Serb forces besieged and captured it and systematically executed more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, burying them in mass graves. They terrorised 35,000 more Bosnian Muslims – women, children and the elderly – before expelling them from the area.

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Syrian food and vaccines at risk as Russia uses UN veto to scupper aid plan

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Frantic talks after Moscow blocks draft security council resolution and agrees to only one border crossing point

Frantic talks are being held after Russia was accused of a “despicable and dangerous” use of its veto at the UN security council to block a draft resolution that would have renewed cross-border humanitarian aid to civilians in Syria.

The veto came at the close of months of negotiations between security council members over the number of cross-border aid points that should be kept open, a dispute fuelled by the Syrian regime’s determination to control the supply of international humanitarian aid to the country.

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Why are the UK and US still downplaying the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda? | Linda Melvern

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Decades after the 1994 genocide, the countries have contested the wording of a UN resolution to remember its victims

As the bodies piled up in the streets of Rwanda 26 years ago, no amount of spin could disguise the crime. There were no sealed camps; the massacres were in broad daylight. Yet in the UN security council the UK and US governments avoided the question of mass killing and saw only a civil war.

This bolstered arguments that nothing – they thought – could be done. It was scandalous, the Czech Republic’s ambassador Karel Kovanda told them, not to recognise that a genocide reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust was under way. Kovanda remembers a friendly arm taking him aside as UK diplomats told him such inflammatory language outside the council would be “unhelpful”.

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Coronavirus: world treating symptoms, not cause of pandemics, says UN

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Ongoing destruction of nature will result in stream of animal diseases jumping to humans, says report

The world is treating the health and economic symptoms of the coronavirus pandemic but not the environmental cause, according to the authors of a UN report. As a result, a steady stream of diseases can be expected to jump from animals to humans in coming years, they say.

The number of such “zoonotic” epidemics is rising, from Ebola to Sars to West Nile virus and Rift Valley fever, with the root cause being the destruction of nature by humans and the growing demand for meat, the report says.

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It’s time the UN faced up to its own treatment of black people like me | Rosebell Kagumire

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An honest conversation about race has to recognise the marginalisation and exploitation of many aid workers

The global push for racial justice following the death of George Floyd in the US has resulted in a flurry of solidarity statements from within the international aid industry, including the UN.

After a shaky start, where its secretary general, António Guterres, was forced to backtrack on a note to staff that suggested they shouldn’t participate in Black Lives Matter (BLM), UN People of African Descent (Unpad) launched a survey to “allow staff to provide data, including on the extent of perceptions of systemic inequality inside the UN, its manifestations, and the responsiveness of the organisation to reports of incidents of systemic racism”.

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$10bn of precious metals dumped each year in electronic waste, says UN

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A fast growing mountain of toxic e-waste is polluting the planet and damaging health, says new report

At least $10bn (£7.9bn) worth of gold, platinum and other precious metals are dumped every year in the growing mountain of electronic waste that is polluting the planet, according to a new UN report.

A record 54m tonnes of “e-waste” was generated worldwide in 2019, up 21% in five years, the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor report found. The 2019 figure is equivalent to 7.3kg for every man, woman and child on Earth, though use is concentrated in richer nations. The amount of e-waste is rising three times faster than the world’s population, and only 17% of it was recycled in 2019.

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US urges allies to maintain UN embargo on arms sales to Iran

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Mike Pompeo opposes lifting embargo, which is due to end in October, citing risk to stability

A US attempt to destroy the Iran nuclear deal, reimpose sanctions and extend a UN embargo on arms sales to Iran risks a “generational setback for the cause of multilateralism and international law”, Iran’s foreign minister has told the UN security council.

Russia’s ambassador to the UN also said the latest US moves to isolate Tehran was like “putting its knee to the neck of the Iranian people”. Vassily Nebenzia described the policy as “a maximum suffocation policy” and said the US’s goal was to make Iran the scapegoat for an uncontrollable escalation in the Middle East.

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Canada’s failed UN security council bid exposes Trudeau’s ‘dilettante’ foreign policy

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Second failed attempt to win seat raises questions about messaging and clarity in Canada’s foreign policy, experts say

When Justin Trudeau was first elected in 2015, he promised that his victory would help Canada vault back on to the world stage, and reclaim a global influence that had eroded in previous years.

“To this country’s friends all around the world, many of you have worried that Canada has lost its compassionate and constructive voice in the world,” Trudeau told a raucous crowd on election night. “Well, I have a simple message for you. On behalf of 35 million Canadians: we’re back.”

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Forcibly displaced now account for 1% of humanity – UN report

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Almost 80 million people are refugees or internally displaced, with the number doubling in the past decade

The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes has doubled over the past decade to almost 80 million, according to the UN refugee agency.

A 9 million rise in the number of those forced to flee in 2019, fuelled by conflict in Syria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burkina Faso, means that one in every 97 people around the world – about 1% of all humanity – is now displaced, according to numbers in UNHCR’s annual report, published on Thursday.

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Pandemics result from destruction of nature, say UN and WHO

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Experts call for legislation and trade deals worldwide to encourage green recovery

Pandemics such as coronavirus are the result of humanity’s destruction of nature, according to leaders at the UN, WHO and WWF International, and the world has been ignoring this stark reality for decades.

The illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade as well as the devastation of forests and other wild places were still the driving forces behind the increasing number of diseases leaping from wildlife to humans, the leaders told the Guardian.

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UN chief expresses shock at discovery of mass graves in Libya

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Fears grow of further atrocities in areas controlled by Khalifa Haftar forces

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has expressed deep shock at the discovery of mass graves in Libyan territory recently recaptured from forces commanded by Khalifa Haftar, and called for a transparent investigation.

Guterres also called on Libya’s UN-backed government to secure the mass graves, identify the victims, establish the causes of death and return the bodies to the next of kin. He offered UN support in carrying out the measures, his spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said.

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