UN News Centre

To honour the more than 3,900 women and men who have lost their lives under the UN flag since 1948, Secretary-General António Guterres laid a wreath at the Peacekeepers’ memorial on Friday, International Day of UN Peacekeepers.

Thirty countries and numerous international partners have underlined the need to make tests, treatments and other technologies to fight COVID-19, available to people everywhere.

The UN human rights office (OHCHR) has welcomed steps taken by social media companies to prevent their platforms from being used to promote hatred, violence and misinformation, Spokesperson Rupert Colville said on Friday.

Shocked over the killing last weekend of five men in Nepal, who had planned to escort home one of their girlfriends from a higher caste, the UN human rights chief on Friday stressed that ending caste-based discrimination is “fundamental” to the overall sustainable development vision of leaving no one behind.

Tobacco products continue to kill eight million people a year who get hooked via a $9 billion a year marketing strategy. That’s the warning from the UN World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday, which has said that even during a global pandemic, the tobacco and nicotine industry has continued to promote products that limit people’s ability to fight new coronavirus and recover from the disease.

The UN human rights chief on Thursday condemned the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd while in police custody in the city of Minneapolis, calling it the latest in “a long line of killings of unarmed African Americans by US police officers and members of the public”.

Some 14 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean could experience severe food insecurity this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to projections released on Thursday by the World Food Programme (WFP).

 The global coronavirus pandemic is testing the multilateral system like never before and the Security Council must stop the “infighting”, and step up to the challenge, the European Union’s foreign policy chief told the 15-member body on Thursday.

Unless countries across the world act together now, the COVID-19 pandemic will cause “unimaginable devastation and suffering around the world”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Thursday at a virtual high-level meeting on financing for development.

UN agencies and their global partners are seeking $2.41 billion to fight COVID-19 spread in Yemen while continuing to support millions affected by the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Despite efforts to stop the harmful promotion of breast-milk substitutes, countries are still falling short in protecting parents from misleading information, according to a new UN report released Wednesday. 

In observance of the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, on Friday, Secretary-General António Guterres will lay a wreath to pay tribute to all the UN blue helmets who have lost their lives since 1948.

A new foundation launched on Wednesday will generate funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) and partners by tapping non-traditional sources, including the public.

Innocent civilians trapped in violence now face “a new and deadly threat” from COVID-19, the UN chief told the Security Council on Wednesday, warning that the pandemic is “amplifying and exploiting the fragilities of our world”.

The UN refugee and migration agencies have welcomed $2.79 billion pledged by donors at a solidarity conference aimed at supporting Venezuelans who fled the protracted crisis in their country for host communities across the region. 

Further evidence of the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 on the global job market has emerged in a new study by the UN labour agency, which on Wednesday said that more than one in six young people have stopped working since the onset of the pandemic.

Independent UN human rights experts fear that some authorities in the United States are using the COVID-19 pandemic to restrict access to abortion, with at least eight states suspending procedures deemed medically unnecessary.

Millions of people around the world have been working remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic and now experts are asking whether this “business as unusual” could be the future of work, at least for those people whose job doesn’t require them to be tied to a particular location.

Humanitarian aid projects to war-torn Yemen are reaching breaking point, and some $870 million is needed to continue giving life-saving assistance to millions of vulnerable people for the next six months, the World Food Programme (WFP), warned on Tuesday.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in East Africa, the UN Human Rights regional office, based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has been contributing to the COVID-19 response of UN country teams in the region, by ensuring that human rights protection for vulnerable people is included in their plans. The head of the office, Nwanneakolam Vwede-Obahor, shared some of the challenges she and her colleagues are facing.