HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

The flow of refugees and migrants from the Horn of Africa across the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea towards Yemen continues to exceed previous records, with over 63,800 people having made this perilous journey in the first seven months of 2012, the United Nations reported.

Exhausted new arrivals recover on a beach after crossing the ocean to southern Yemen. Photo: SHS/A.S. Hussein/UNHCR

This marks a 30 per cent increase over the number of arrivals during the same period last year, which was 48,700, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“Once data for August is compiled, we expect to see another spike in arrivals in Yemen,” a UNHCR spokesperson, Melissa Fleming, said in Geneva.

She said 2011 was also a record year with more than 103,000 arrivals by sea to Yemen, the highest total since 2006 when UNHCR started collecting data on this route.

Human Wrongs Watch

By Ramesh Jaura, InDepthNews*, Berlin – The Geneva UN Conference on Disarmament (CD) has been turned into a talking shop because of the vested interests of a few mighty states without whose consent no genuine nuclear disarmament, not to speak of abolition of nuclear weapons, would ever be within the realm of possibility.

Nuclear test carried out on 18 April 1953 at the Nevada test site | UN

This formed the backdrop to an impassioned appeal by Ambassador Hellmut Hoffmann of Germany to representatives of 64 countries, including all nuclear weapon states, to avail of the potential of this United Nations body to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Germany took over from France the CD presidency on August 20.