'Unseen' News and Views
The many life-threatening dangers faced by children from Central America who are being deported from the United States of America and Mexico, are highlighted in a new report from United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on 15 August 2018, which also draws attention to the traumatic consequences of family separation by migration authorities.
.
With the death toll rising after days of intense fighting for the Afghan city of Ghazni, south-west of Kabul, the Head of the United Nations mission in the country (UNAMA) on 15 August 2018 said that the situation was “unacceptable” and called on warring parties to lay down their arms and seek a political solution to the conflict.
.
15 August 2018 – The decision by Israel to reopen the only functional commercial crossing point into Gaza which has been closed to most deliveries for weeks, has been welcomed by the United Nations Secretary-General.
15 August 2018 – The court decision to award nearly $290 million to a terminally-ill man from the United States who claimed his cancer was caused by a herbicide in a commercial weed killer, has been welcomed by two United Nations human rights experts as a “significant recognition” of the responsibilities that chemical companies have to consumers.
A court in California on Friday ruled that chemical giant Monsanto should compensate Dewayne Johnson, a school groundskeeper, after a jury found the company did not place a warning label on its weed killers, stating that their widespread use could cause terminal cancer.
Following a two-day mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Head of the World Health Organization (WHO) on 14 August 2018 repeated his call for warring parties in conflict-riven North Kivu to stop fighting, and allow health teams access to areas affected by the recent Ebola outbreak in the region.
15 August 2018 – For four years, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has been taking governments across the world to task, publicly naming and shaming States which have fallen short of their human rights obligations.*
Libyan militias have forced nearly 2,000 people from an ethnic minority likely targeted for their alleged links to the former Gadaffi Government, to flee long-established shelters in the capital Tripoli, the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, on 14 August 2018 said.
Caspian Sea deal an invaluable step towards easing regional tensions, says UN Chief
UN Photo/Mark Garten | UN Secretary-General António Guterres
14 August 2018 — António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, has welcomed the historic signing of the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea, which took place on Sunday [13 August 2018], marked by a ceremony which brought together the leaders of the five countries bordering its coastline.
The region has been a subject of dispute, ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Up until that time, the Caspian – the largest enclosed body of water on earth – was shared by just two states, the USSR and Iran.
Today, Iran has to share it with Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, all of which have different, and divergent, interests as far as the sea is concerned.
13 August 2018 – For some time the Association of World Citizens has been concerned with the impact on children of U.N.-proclaimed sanctions as well as the impact of national boycotts of a State.
René Wadlow
On the one hand, economic and trade sanctions is one of the few instruments short of war to enforce world law and to modify in a positive direction the behavior of a State.
On the other hand, sanctions also can be a blunt weapon hitting the weak, sick and hungry who usually have had no or little influence on the policy being sanctioned.
In addition to U.N.-proclaimed sanctions, there have been national boycotts, often linked to internal political considerations such as the US boycott against Cuba or that of certain Arab States against Israel.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 