Taking a stand against ongoing threats, harassment and murder of environmental defenders, the United Nations on 6 March 2018 launched an initiative enlisting business communities to champion a clean and healthy environment.
World Bank/Curt Carnemark | Tree stumps in Indonesian forest | Source: UN News Centre
“Those who struggle to protect planet and people should be celebrated as heroes , but the sad fact is that many are paying a heavy price with their safety and sometimes their lives,” Erik Solheim, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said Tuesday [6 March 2018], launching the UN Environmental Rights Initiative in Geneva.
6 March 2018 — The brutal conflict in Syria has not only claimed civilians as unintentional victims but has seen all warring parties deliberately target them with complete impunity employing unlawful methods of warfare, a new report by a United Nations-mandated inquiry on the war-ravaged country has said.
UNICEF/UN0145425/Charbonneau | A boy walks past severely destroyed houses in a neighborhood in eastern Aleppo, Syria.
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Drawing from over 500 interviews, the latest report from of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria – established by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate and record all violations of international law since March 2011 – documents deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians and protected objects, starvation, unlawful internment, and the use of chemical weapons.
Latest data on development progress for children reveals that more than half a billion live in countries where the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are “quickly falling out of reach,” the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on 6 March 2018 warned.
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UNICEF/UNI126514/Khan | A child stands beside a wall at his family’s home in rural Bangladesh.
“More than half the world’s children live in countries where we either can’t track their SDG progress, or where we can and they are woefully off-track,” said Laurence Chandy, UNICEF Director for the Division of Data, Research and Policy.
6 March 2018 — The “frenzied” scale of unspeakable violence against the minority Muslim Rohingya community in Myanmar has shifted to a “lower intensity campaign of terror and forced starvation,” seemingly intended to drive the remaining Rohingyas from their homeland, a senior United Nations human rights official has warned.
UNICEF/UN0136205/LeMoyne | A group of Rohingya refugees including women and small children cross into Bangladesh at Palong Khali in Cox’s Bazar district.
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“The ethnic cleansing of Rohingya from Myanmar continues. I don’t think we can draw any other conclusion from what I have seen and heard in Cox’s Bazar,” Andrew Gilmour, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, said at the end of a four-day visit to Bangladesh which is hosting more than 800,000 Rohingya refugees, most of whom fled Myanmar this past August in the wake of a crackdown by the country’s security forces.
It is the working man who is the happy man. (Benjamin Franklin)
I grew up on a street with a strange, archaic name: it seemed to indicate a profession, or a job at the feudal court. I imagined this man as wearing many layers of sumptuous clothes and carrying lots of keys.
I asked a teacher, but he was not sure of the exact role, no more precise than referring to a position at court, held by a minor aristocrat, sometime before the 18th century.
(Washington, DC) – United States border agents routinely hold families, including infants, in freezing cells when it takes them into custody at or near the border, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on 28 February 2018.
Footage of women and children in immigration holding cells in Douglas, Arizona, September 2015, made public in 2016 after a group of migrants challenged detention conditions in the cells. US Customs and Border Protection via American Immigration Council | Source: Human Rights Watch.
Iran is implementing a series of commitments under the nuclear agreement reached with key countries in 2015, the head of the United Nations nuclear energy agency 5 March 2018 said.
Dean Calma/IAEA | Yukiya Amano, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), briefs members of the media in Vienna.
“As of today, I can state that Iran is implementing its nuclear-related commitments,” he said in his introductory statement to the Board of Governors, one of the two policy-making bodies of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Increased hunger and food insecurity, fuelled by conflict and climatic challenges, continues to inflict suffering on populations in different parts of the world, forcing them to remain dependent on humanitarian assistance, a new United Nations report has warned.
FAO/Hkun Lat | A girl runs through deserted farmland in Mynmar’s Sagaing region where floods buried valuable fertile soil under several feet of mud which later dried hard and cracked, making land preparations very difficult and expensive.
Children in crisis situations face a raft of challenges – from family separation and forced recruitment to sexual exploitation and abject poverty – the deputy United Nations human rights chief on 5 March 2018 said, urging immediate action to protect children from the consequences of “all too adult failings.”
UNICEF/Vishwanathan | Villagers watch folk artists perform a street play on the issue of child marriage and the evils of it, at the village square, in Jamua block of the Giridih district of Jharkhand state, India.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 