Category Archives: United Nations

Africa facing a quarter of a billion coronavirus cases, WHO predicts

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But continent will have fewer deaths than Europe and US because of its younger population and other lifestyle factors

Nearly a quarter of a billion people across 47 African countries will catch coronavirus over the next year, but the result will be fewer severe cases and deaths than in the US and Europe, new research predicts.

A model by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) regional office for Africa, published in the BMJ Global Health, predicts a lower rate of transmission and viral spread across the continent than elsewhere, resulting in up to 190,000 deaths. But the authors warn the associated rise in hospital admissions, care needs and “huge impact” on services such as immunisation and maternity, will overwhelm already stretched health services.

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Women are on the Covid-19 frontline – we must give them the support they need | Mark Lowcock and Natalia Kanem

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An effective response to the pandemic means tackling the violence and inequality faced by women

After a week in which people in some parts of the world have been given cause for optimism that they may have passed the peak of the pandemic, we have seen how extraordinary actions of individuals can change the trajectory for a whole nation.

Retired doctors putting themselves back on the frontline, nurses making their own face masks, parents voluntarily separated from their children so they can care for the sick.

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Greta Thunberg and children’s group hit back at attempt to throw out climate case

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Brazil, France and Germany say UN can’t hear complaint against five countries of flouting child rights to clean air

Greta Thunberg and a group of other children have pushed forward their legal complaint at the UN against countries they accuse of endangering children’s wellbeing through the climate crisis, despite attempts to have it thrown out.

The 16 children, including the Swedish environmental activist, lodged a legal case with the UN committee on the rights of the child against Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey last September.

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Myanmar military may be repeating crimes against humanity, UN rapporteur warns

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Yanghee Lee says the army is ‘maximising suffering’ on Rohingya and other people in attacks reminiscent of the 2017 assault in Rakhine state

Myanmar’s military may once again be committing crimes against humanity in Rakhine state, the UN special rapporteur on human rights has warned, urging the international community to prevent further atrocities.

In a damning statement issued on Wednesday, Yanghee Lee said the military was inflicting immense suffering on communities living in conflict-affected states, and called for increased efforts to “ensure that there is not another systemic failure like in 2017”. The military had also expanded its campaign against minorities from Rakhine to neighbouring Chin state, she said.

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Coronavirus treatments should belong to the whole world, says UN secretary general – video

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António Guterres joined leaders from the European Union and beyond on Friday to ensure all countries receive the tools to fight the coronavirus outbreak. Speaking during a virtual WHO launch event, Guterres said treatments and vaccines should belong to the whole world, not to individual countries or regions. 'Not a vaccine or treatments for one country or one region or one-half of the world,' Guterres said, 'but a vaccine and treatment that is affordable, safe, effective, easily administered and universally available for everyone, everywhere.'

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Coronavirus pandemic is becoming a human rights crisis, UN warns

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Report released on authoritarian responses, surveillance, closed borders and other rights abuses

The coronavirus pandemic must not be used as a pretext for authoritarian states to trample over individual human rights, or repress the free flow of information, the UN secretary general António Guterres warned today in a fresh attempt to bring the UN’s influence to bear on the crisis. He said what had started as a public health emergency was rapidly turning into a human rights crisis.

Government responses to the crisis have been regarded as disproportionate in countries including China, India, Hungary, Turkey and South Africa.

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US and Russia blocking UN plans for a global ceasefire amid crisis

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Resolution strongly supported by dozens of countries, human rights groups and charities

The Trump administration and Russia are blocking efforts to win binding UN security council backing for a global ceasefire to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 150,000 lives worldwide.

Related: Coronavirus world map: which countries have the most cases and deaths?

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North Korea defies sanctions with China’s help, UN panel says

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International report claims Pyongyang has been transferring coal exports to Chinese barges

North Korea sharply stepped up trade in coal and oil products last year in defiance of UN sanctions through the apparent help of China’s shipping industry, a UN panel has said.

The annual report to the UN Security Council by sanctions experts went online on Friday and inexplicably disappeared later in the day, with the text itself noting China’s reservations about the findings.

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‘Race against time’ to prevent famines during coronavirus crisis

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UN calls for international solidarity to ease effects of Covid-19 on food security

Vulnerable parts of the developing world, particularly in Africa, are at risk of sliding into famine as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, while humanitarian relief efforts are being hindered by lockdowns and travel restrictions, according to the UN.

Experts raised the spectre of unrest similar to that seen in 2007-08 when food price rises sparked riots around the world, destabilising fragile states and fuelling conflict in ways that are still being felt. They told the Guardian that the world could still avoid such a crisis, but time was running out.

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Foreigners targeted in Central African Republic as coronavirus fears grow

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Peacekeeping and aid operations face disruption as outsiders are scapegoated in one of Africa’s most vulnerable countries

A backlash against foreigners in Central African Republic threatens to disrupt peacekeeping and aid supplies in one of Africa’s most fragile countries.

Since an Italian missionary was identified as CAR’s first coronavirus case last month, xenophobia has been on the rise. Unfounded stories widely published in the country’s newspapers and on social media have portrayed foreigners as unwelcome importers of a disease that could further impoverish the country.

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Syrian regime blamed for sarin gas attacks in landmark report

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Report by UN-aligned body that oversees chemical weapons use is hailed by rights groups

The UN-aligned body that oversees chemical weapons use has for the first time blamed the Syrian regime for using sarin gas on the battlefield in a report hailed by rights groups as a landmark moment with implications for war crimes investigations.

The report, released on Wednesday by the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), accuses the Syrian Air Force of twice using sarin to attack the town of Ltamenah in late March 2017. It also found that regime aircraft had bombed the same town with chlorine gas in the same week.

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UN inquiry stops short of directly blaming Russia over Idlib attacks

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Report says ‘government of Syria and/or its allies’ carried out strikes on hospitals and school

A UN investigation has stopped short of directly calling Russia a perpetrator in attacks on hospitals and other humanitarian infrastructure in rebel-held areas of Syria, a move greeted with disappointment from rights groups.

A summary of a 185-page internal report submitted to the UN security council on Monday said that in five of seven cases studied – among them four medical sites, a school and a children’s centre – “the government of Syria and/or its allies had carried out the airstrike”, but it did not explicitly name Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s most important military and political ally.

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OPCW report set to blame Syria chemical attacks on Bashar al-Assad

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Watchdog to release first report blaming president for attacks during the conflict

The UN’s chemical weapons watchdog is expected to release its first report explicitly blaming Bashar al-Assad for sarin and chlorine gas attacks on civilians in Syria as efforts to establish accountability for the use of chemical agents in the nine-year-old conflict gain momentum.

Observers anticipate that public and classified versions of a report by a new unit at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) will be published on Wednesday, close to the anniversaries of a major chlorine attack on the then rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma that killed at least 85 people in 2018 as well as a deadly sarin attack on Khan Sheikhun in 2017 which killed at least 89. The report is believed to focus on 2017 attacks on the village of al-Lataminah.

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US awol from world stage as China tries on global leadership for size

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Mike Pompeo labelling the virus ‘Chinese’ has added to lack of international cooperation

When the UN security council and the G7 group sought to agree a global response to the coronavirus pandemic, the efforts stumbled on the US insistence on describing the threat as distinctively Chinese.

There are other reasons for the lack of collaboration in the face of a global crisis, but the focus on labelling the virus Chinese and blaming China pursued by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, helped ensure there would be no meaningful collective response from the world’s most powerful nations.

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Libya fighting intensifies as rival forces defy UN call for global ceasefire

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Factions step up offensives while international actors distracted by coronavirus pandemic

Libyan armed factions have defied a UN call for a “global ceasefire” by escalating fighting across the country, with forces loyal to eastern warlord Gen Khalifa Haftar claiming to have gained control of a string of towns in the north-west.

A spokesman for Haftar said his forces, the Libyan National Army (LNA), had also repulsed an offensive by the UN-backed government of national accord designed to capture its key airbase – the failure of which will increase the fragility of the Tripoli government and its dependence on its Turkish backers.

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Coronavirus measures could cause global food shortage, UN warns

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Exclusive: Protectionist policies and shortage of workers could see problems start within weeks

Protectionist measures by national governments during the coronavirus crisis could provoke food shortages around the world, the UN’s food body has warned.

Harvests have been good and the outlook for staple crops is promising, but a shortage of field workers brought on by the virus crisis and a move towards protectionism – tariffs and export bans – mean problems could quickly appear in the coming weeks, Maximo Torero, chief economist of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, told the Guardian.

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Poor water infrastructure is greater risk than coronavirus, says UN

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On World Water Day, UN warns that more than half the global population lacking access to safely managed sanitation

Decades of chronic underfunding of water infrastructure is putting many countries at worse risk in the coronavirus crisis, with more than half the global population lacking access to safely managed sanitation, experts said as the UN marked World Water Day on Sunday.

Good hygiene – soap and water – are the first line of defence against coronavirus and a vast range of other diseases, yet three quarters of households in developing countries do not have access to somewhere to wash with soap and water, according to Tim Wainwright, chief executive of the charity WaterAid. A third of healthcare facilities in developing countries also lack access to clean water on site.

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‘It became part of life’: how Haiti curbed cholera

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When cholera broke out just months after a devastating earthquake, Haiti’s health system was pushed to the brink. The extraordinary rearguard action that followed offers an object lesson in dealing with a public health crisis

Marie Millande Tulmé was at work in a prison when she received a call confirming her fears: the gruesome sickness spreading rapidly across her nation was indeed cholera.

The head nurse for Haiti’s Central Plateau region at the time, Tulmé was investigating rumours that prisoners were getting violently ill and that two had died. “I thought: ‘Haiti will perish,’” she says, recalling her reaction when Haiti’s national laboratory phoned with the news. “Because I knew that cholera was grave. That it spreads easily.”

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West Saharan group takes New Zealand superannuation fund to court over ‘blood phosphate’

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Independence movement lodges documents in high court arguing $45bn fund invests in illegally mined fertiliser

The Western Sahara liberation movement has taken New Zealand’s superannuation fund to the country’s highest court over its investments in farms that use phosphate illegally mined in the occupied territory.

New Zealand is one of the few remaining countries – and last western nation – that accepts imports from the contested territory in West Africa, forcibly occupied by Morocco since 1975. Morocco’s claims to the territory are largely unrecognised internationally.

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Coronavirus pandemic reaches world leaders and disrupts global sporting events

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Justin Trudeau’s wife and diplomat at the UN test positive as Australian Grand Prix is cancelled and Arsenal and Chelsea teams affected

The coronavirus has reached the highest levels of government and the sporting world, with Canada’s prime minister isolating himself when his wife tested positive, the Arsenal manager and a Chelsea player being diagnosed and the Australian Grand Prix cancelled just hours before the event was due to start.

On Thursday night, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s wife, announced she had been diagnosed with Covid-19 after returning from the UK. Her symptoms were mild and she began two weeks of isolation. Her husband also began isolation and was “in good health with no symptoms”.

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