(UN News)* — The international community must act now to protect future generations from the scourge of conflict-related sexual violence, the UN’s advocate on the issue, Pramila Patten, told the Security Council on Friday [
UN Photo/Marie Frechon (file)
Victims of sexual violence at a shelter in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo. UN Photo/Marie Frechon (file)
“Every new wave of warfare brings with it a rising tide of human tragedy, including new waves of war’s oldest, most silenced and least condemned crime,” she said.
The Council meeting to examine implementation of its resolutions on conflict-related sexual violence was convened by the United Kingdom, which holds the rotating presidency this month.
More children continue to fall victims of trafficking from exploitative and discriminative practices. Photo: IOM.
Geneva/ Washington, 5 July 2023 (IOM)* – More than half of child trafficking victims are trafficked within their own country according to new report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University (FXB).
The report further reveals that in cases of international trafficking children are mostly trafficked to neighbouring, wealthier countries.
Bangladesh authorities are failing to adequately protect Rohingya refugees from surging violence by armed groups and criminal gangs, with layers of barriers to police, legal, and medical assistance.
Authorities have been forcing Rohingya leaders to serve as informants, putting them at grave risk of being abducted or killed, without access to protection.
Dire Dawa, 10 July 2023 (IOM)* – Sixteen-year-old Abel Ahmed* has never been to school. Originally from Dera, Oromia Regional State, North Shoa Zone in Ethiopia, his family could not afford to send him to school. Instead, he was supporting his family’s small-scale farming on their piece of land where they planted sorghum. .
Abel* is a 16-year-old migrant boy who decided to take the Eastern Route for economic reasons. Photo: IOM 2023/Eva Sibanda
“My family has problems with money. I had a plan to go to school but I could not,” he explains.
One month ago, he left home with his peers and friends to look for work, having heard of stories from family members who managed to succeed in finding work in Yemen.
A study by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reveals that children from Habru, Dire Dawa, Bedeno and Sigmo parts of Oromia in Ethiopia reported having been subjected to forms of child labour, including hazardous work in farms in Yemen.
(UN News)* — The UN’s top human rights official urged respect for religious tolerance on Tuesday []as Member States gathered in Geneva in response to the recent burning of the holy Quran in the Swedish capital.
UNAMA/Barat Ali Batoor | Men pray at a mosque in Afghanistan.
Addressing the Human Rights Council, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk noted that the tome was the “core of faith” for well over one billion Muslims.
Those who had burned the Quran most likely did so “to express contempt and inflame anger”, Mr. Türk said, as he warned that these acts also aimed “to drive wedges between people”, to provoke and transform differences into hatred.
(UN NEWS)* — Global sea surface temperatures reached a record high in May, June, and July – and the warming El Niño weather pattern is only just getting started – experts at the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Monday [].
Unsplash/Rafael Garcin
Global sea surface temperatures were at a record high in May and June 2023.
Alarm bells have been rung at the UN agency in particular because of an “unprecedented peak” in sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic.
MADRID, Jul 10 2023 (IPS)* – A quick glance at the current European political map would clearly show how far the extremist ideology has been installed in European countries –those who still wave the French Revolution’s flag of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”
Credit: United Nations
According to the Napoleonic French Revolution’s three pillars, Liberty means freedom for an individual to do what he/she wants to do without harming others’ Liberty. Equality means equal opportunity to all the citizens irrespective of their caste, religion, race, gender.
Fraternity means an environment of brotherhood among the citizens of a nation.
(UN NEWS)* — With over 18,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) lurking beyond the stratosphere, 2,000 of which are classified as potentially hazardous, the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) is using Friday’s International Asteroid Dayto raise awareness across the planet.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA | Asteroid tracks among the stars.
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NEOs are asteroids or comets that come relatively close to the Sun, to about 50 million kilometres from Earth’s orbit. Some of them, ‘potentially hazardous objects’ (PHOs), come even closer – in interstellar terms – with a minimum distance of less than 7.5 million kilometres.
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Measuring more than 140 meters across, the PHOs have the potential to cause regional devastation with possible global consequences.
(UN NEWS)* — Senior UN officials and donor partners on Sunday [] visited the Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin, where they witnessed the “shocking” damage sustained during the Israeli incursion this past week.
The two-day Israeli military operation, which included airstrikes in this densely populated community, caused the worst level of destruction in more than 20 years in Jenin camp.
The two-day military operation was the fiercest in over 20 years, according to the UN agency that supports Palestine refugees, UNRWA.
Europe was the epicenter of World Wars I and II, and now it threatens, with its war in the Ukraine, to kindle World War III.
As usual in history, overt warfare is the fruit of a constant, underlying culture of war. And in the case of Europe, it was the culture of war developed over many centuries to maintain the profits of colonialism.
Dr. David Adams
To understand this, let us first turn to that old critic, Vladimir Lenin.
In his essay War and Revolution of May, 1917, Lenin wrote, “Peace reigned in Europe, but this was because domination over hundreds of millions of people in the colonies by the European nations was sustained only through constant, incessant, interminable wars, which we Europeans do not regard as wars at all, since all too often they resembled, not wars, but brutal massacres, the wholesale slaughter of unarmed peoples.”
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 