Archive for ‘Migrants and Refugees’

19/01/2022

UNRWA Seeks $1.6 Billion to Support Palestinian Refugees in 2022

Human Wrongs Watch

(UN News)* — The UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, on Tuesday [18 January 2022] appealed for $1.6 billion to support its lifesaving work this year amid acute regional crises and chronic funding shortfalls.

© UNRWA 2021/Mohamed Hinnawi | A young girl takes part in UNRWA’s Keeping Kids Cool summer activities in Gaza.

UNRWA provides services and programmes, including education, health and food assistance, to more than five million Palestinians across the Middle East.

The 2022 budget proposal includes additional emergency funding to address humanitarian needs arising from crises in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon.

read more »

19/01/2022

2021, One of the Seven Warmest Years on Record

Human Wrongs Watch

Geneva, 19 January 2022 (WMO)* – Although average global temperatures were temporarily cooled by the 2020-2022 La Niña events, 2021 was still one of the seven warmest years on record, according to six leading international datasets consolidated by the World Meteorological Organization.

thumbnail

Global warming and other long-term climate change trends are expected to continue as a result of record levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The average global temperature in 2021 was about 1.11 (± 0.13) °C above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels. 2021 is the 7th consecutive year (2015-2021) where global temperature has been over 1°C above pre-industrial levels, according to all datasets compiled by WMO.

read more »

18/01/2022

Hey, Hey, USA! How Many Bombs Did You Drop Today?

Human Wrongs Watch

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies – TRANSCEND Media Service*

The Pentagon has finally published its first Airpower Summary since President Biden took office nearly a year ago. These monthly reports have been published since 2007 to document the number of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S.-led air forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria since 2004. But President Trump stopped publishing them after February 2020, shrouding continued U.S. bombing in secrecy.

August 2020 U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed 10 Afghan civilians. Credit: Getty Images

Over the past 20 years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied air forces have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries. That is an average of 46 strikes per day for 20 years.

read more »

18/01/2022

As the Pandemic Devastates the Poor, the World’s 10 Richest Have Multiplied their Wealth into Trillions

Human Wrongs Watch

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 2022 (IPS)* – The numbers are unbelievably staggering: the world’s 10 richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day, according to a new study from Oxfam International.

In Malawi, some students have been going to school amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: UNICEF/Malumbo Simwaka

These phenomenal changes in fortunes took place during the first two years of a Covid-19 pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall, and over 160 million more people forced into poverty—60 million more than the figures released by the World Bank in 2020.

“If these ten men were to lose 99.999 percent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 percent of all the people on this planet,” said Oxfam International’s Executive Director Gabriela Bucher.

read more »

18/01/2022

Ukraine: The West Has Paved the Road to War with Lies

Human Wrongs Watch

By Jan Oberg, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service*

While this is being written, tension builds up around the more comprehensive Ukraine conflict formation. If this blows up in real war – God forbid! – the main reason will be three serious lies disseminated by the NATO side.

Ukraine-map-Britannica-768x535

Britannica

Lies are used in so-called security politics when some militarist project doesn’t make any (common) sense to intelligent people, when the real motives have to be covered up and war is being prepared or when the sociological cancer called the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, and the elites who run it, try to squeeze out even larger military expenditures from their taxpayers.

read more »

15/01/2022

Fully Ready to Kill, Shockingly Unprepared to Save Lives

Human Wrongs Watch

MADRID, Jan 14 2022 (IPS)* – While absolutely ready to kill, with the biggest military powers spending in 2020 nearly two trillion US dollars on weapons, the world is shockingly unprepared to save the lives of millions of unarmed, innocent civilian victims of wars… and other man-made catastrophes.

Credit: Albert Gonzalez Farran / UNAMID

The military spending data come from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which also reports that global nuclear arsenals grow as states continue to modernise, thus sharply increasing the dangers of an unimaginable number of victims of the most devastating death machinery.

read more »

15/01/2022

Decade of Sahel Conflict Leaves 2.5 Million People Displaced

Human Wrongs Watch

(UN News)* — The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) called on Friday [14 January 2022] for concerted international action to end armed conflict in Africa’s central Sahel region, which has forced more than 2.5 million people to flee their homes in the last decade.

.

© UNHCR/Nana Kofi Acquah | An internally displaced woman prepares food for her family in Burkina Faso.

.

Speaking to journalists in Geneva, the agency’s spokesperson, Boris Cheshirkov, informed that internal displacement has increased tenfold since 2013, going from 217,000 to a staggering 2.1 million by late last year.

The number of refugees in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger now stands at 410,000, and the majority comes from Mali, where major civil conflict erupted in 2012, leading to a failed coup and an on-going extremist insurgency.

read more »

15/01/2022

UK Borders Bill Increases Risks of Discrimination, Human Rights Violations

Human Wrongs Watch

(UN News)* — A new bill being debated by lawmakers in the United Kingdom increases the risk of discrimination and “serious human rights violations” and breaches the country’s obligations under international law, five independent UN human rights experts on 14 January 2022 said.

.

UNICEF/Geai | A boy walks through a migrant camp in Calais, northern France, hoping to enter the United Kingdom. (file)
.
If adopted, the Nationality and Borders Bill would “seriously undermine the protection of the human rights of trafficked persons, including children; increase risks of exploitation faced by all migrants and asylum seekers; and lead to serious human rights violations”, Siobhán Mullally, the UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, said in a statement.
14/01/2022

Kenyan Domestic Workers’ Doomed Voyages to the Gulf

Human Wrongs Watch

Trafficked, kept prisoner in Saudi Arabia Wanjiku Njoki was lucky to escape unharmed. She has since found work serving tea for a government parastatal. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

And this fear is all too familiar for 28-year-old Wanjiku Njoki. The young woman’s whose search for greener pastures in the Gulf landed her in the hands of a physically, mentally, and verbally abusive employer.

In 2018, she travelled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

read more »

13/01/2022

Disparities in the Arab Region: Hunger Doubles, Indebtedness Triggers, Recovery Uneven

Human Wrongs Watch

MADRID, Jan 12 2022 (IPS)* – The panorama is bleak: hunger in the Arab region continues to rise, with more than 90% increase since 2000, while indebtedness is growing, and the economic recovery is tenuous and uneven.

Tents and makeshift shelters at an IDP camp in Yemen. Credit: UNICEF/Alessio Romenzi

The 2021 Near East and North Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition shows that the number of hungry people in the region reached 69 million people in 2020, “triggered by protracted crises, social unrests and exposure to multiple shocks and stresses such as conflicts, poverty, inequality, climate change, scarce natural resources and the economic repercussions associated with the recent COVID-19 pandemic.”

read more »