UN News Centre

Underlining that “diversity is a richness, not a threat”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for greater investment in promoting social cohesion and tackling bigotry in a message on Wednesday to mark the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. 

The Janssen COVID-19 vaccine was publicly approved for international use on Wednesday by UN health agency expert advisory board, SAGE, which allayed concerns over clotting events being associated by some countries, without definitive evidence, with coronavirus jabs.

The recent “horrific killings” of dozens of civilians in two villages in western Niger have been condemned in the strongest terms by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). 

An arms embargo imposed on Libya by the Security Council in 2011 remains “totally ineffective” a UN Panel of Experts has said, adding that civilians, including migrants and asylum seekers, continue to suffer widespread rights violations and abuses. 

Severe disruptions in health services due to the COVID-19 pandemic may have resulted in an additional 239,000 child and maternal deaths in South Asia last year, United Nations agencies said on Wednesday. 

The UN rights chief said on Tuesday that empowering women and girls to participate fully in public life is both the right and “smart thing to do”, speaking on a day that saw history being made with the first ever address to the UN by a woman Vice President of the United States. 

The UN’s top official in Yemen has warned of a “dramatic” deterioration in the country’s ongoing conflict, telling the Security Council on Tuesday that fighting has expanded on several fronts amid the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. 

The UN Secretary-General has urged corporate leaders to achieve gender equality, highlighting the benefits for the private sector and society at large. 

Women need to be “front and centre” of the pandemic recovery as a matter of economics, efficiency, effectiveness and social resilience, the UN chief told the women’s commission on Tuesday. 

As hunger levels continue to deepen in South Sudan due to a combination of violence, climate change and COVID-19, the 2021 South Sudan Humanitarian Response Plan was launched on Tuesday aiming to reach 6.6 million people – including 350,000 refugees - with life-saving assistance and protection.

The UN World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday, highlighted the risks of separating newborns from mothers, with new research showing that up to 125,000 lives could be saved by keeping them together to ensure skin-to-skin contact. 

This week, Syria marks a grim anniversary: 10 years since the start of the country’s grinding conflict. Today, one decade into the catastrophe, about half the country’s population has been uprooted, with some 12 million people internally displaced or living as refugees.  

The UN human rights office (OHCHR) said on Tuesday it is “deeply disturbed” that the crackdown on peaceful protesters in Myanmar “continues to intensify”, with a soaring death toll on the streets, increasingly aggressive use of lethal force, arbitrary arrests, and reports of torture in custody. 

Social media has too often been used with “relative impunity” to spread hate, prejudice and violence against minorities, an independent UN human right expert said on Monday, calling for an international treaty to address the growing scourge.

Health officials from the UN and the European Union will meet this week on the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine after several more countries suspended its use, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. 

As the Syrian war reaches its grim decade-long milestone, the UN envoy for the country told the Security Council on Monday that it will “go down as one of the darkest chapters in recent history” referring to the Syrian people as among “the greatest victims of this century”. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a devastating impact on women and girls, and the fallout has shown how deeply gender inequality remains embedded in the world’s political, social and economic systems, UN chief António Guterres said in his address to the Commission on the Status of Women, on Monday. This year’s Commission will focus on charting a global roadmap towards achieving full equality in public life but, as Mr. Guterres recalled in his speech, gender equality in all walks of life is a long way off and has been further undermined by the pandemic.

Military and political officials in South Sudan supporting community-based militias in the Greater Jonglei region, must be held accountable for violence that killed more than 700 people over a six-month period last year, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Monday. 

The pain and deprivation of individual Syrians and the widespread destruction, a decade of conflict has wrought on Syria, has been documented in a series of images taken by 16 photographers working in the country.

The UN chief on Monday issued a statement saying he was "appalled" by the reported killing over the weekend of dozens of protesters calling for the restoration of democracy, at the hands of the country's military.