Week in Review

The humanitarian situation following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine is still a “moving target”, immediate needs are “huge”, and concerns are rising for what the future holds, according to the UN’s top official in the country, Denise Brown.

Warring parties in Sudan must do more to protect civilians caught up in the conflict, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Friday, in response to recent deadly attacks and ongoing violations. 

Over a third of global fish stocks are being harvested at unsustainable levels – just one example of how human activity is harming oceans, which cover more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface.

During their nearly four-year reign of terror in Iraq, ISIL extremists developed at least eight chemical agents, tested them on humans, and carried out at least 13 attacks, UN experts reported on Thursday. 

For Valdecir Nascimento, 63, the Black movement in Brazil was a “turning point” for her as a young woman, leading her from the revolutionary stilt houses in Alagados, to joining more than 1,000 participants last week at UN Headquarters for the second session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.

The UN Young Leaders for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an inspiring group of young people from across the world, achieving great things in areas as diverse as gender equality, climate action, and health equity.

The current cohort were all in New York in April for the 2023 UN Youth Forum, an annual gathering where youthful changemakers can voice their opinions, contribute to policy discussions at the UN, and put forward innovative solutions to the challenges the world faces.

Conor Lennon caught up with three of the Leaders during the event: Sudanese women’s rights advocate Mayada Adil, Paul Ndhlovu, a voice for young people living with HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe, and Gibson Kawago, a social entrepreneur bringing clean energy to rural communities in Tanzania.

Music: Within the Earth, Ketsa

Laws making seat belt use mandatory in cars have saved millions of lives, UN agencies announced on Tuesday, marking half a century of vehicular safety legislation around the world.

Perfectly foamed milk. A delicate butterfly enswirled atop. A bittersweet tang on the palate. A perfect cappuccino? It is beyond that. This particular cup was masterfully frothed and served by Denny, an inmate in Tangerang, a prison to the west of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, who joined a UN-supported training programme aimed at helping prisoners to re-integrate into society after serving time.

Kourou/Koualou, a tiny village in a neutral zone straddling Benin and Burkina Faso, was the centre of a one-million-litre-a-year cross-border illicit fuel trade, a snapshot of a phenomenon that spreads far across the 6,000-kilometre-wide African Sahel region.

When it comes to fighting for a sustainable future, the world’s cities are “critical battlegrounds” and more important than ever to making multilateralism work for all, said the UN chief in a video message on Monday to the United Nations Habitat Assembly.

With new and emerging technologies, we hear a lot about killer drones, driverless tanks and autonomous airplanes on the modern battlefield.

One issue of particular concern is the use of what are officially known as lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), which can select and engage targets with force, without human involvement – raising a raft of security, ethical and legal concerns.

What are countries doing to regulate LAWS? And how can international law and the UN respond to this challenge?

To explore these and other questions, the Group of Governmental Experts on LAWS began meeting at the UN in 2017, as Mélanie Régimbal, Chief of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs in Geneva, explains to UN News’s Nancy Sarkis.

Proposed legislation in New York state, in the northeast United States, could provide effective and fair relief for developing countries crippled by debt, two experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said on Thursday. 

As international negotiators committed to hammering out a draft treaty by November on ending plastic pollution, the UN chief stressed in his message for World Environment Day on Monday, the importance of curbing the “catastrophic” consequences of waste plastics.

Every day, some 1.6 million people worldwide fall ill from eating contaminated food, which kills 420,000 people each year, two UN agencies said on Tuesday.  

Tens of thousands of civilians in Ukraine are in danger on the frontline, after the apparent destruction of a huge dam on Tuesday, which the UN chief described as a “monumental humanitarian, economic and environmental catastrophe” resulting directly from Russia’s invasion of the country. 

The world is not on track to meet Sustainable Development Goal 7, designed to ensure access to affordable, reliable energy for all, a new report from the UN and partners revealed on Monday.