Articles

Four children – three boys and a girl – were killed on Monday morning while travelling to school in northwest Syria, along with a teacher, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Wednesday. UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Ted Chaiban, said in a statement that they were victims of an attack on a market in Ariha, south of Idlib. The governorate is the last rebel held enclave in the country. According to news reports, a total of ten people were killed in the...

Israel has been urged to either release or charge five Palestinian prisoners currently on hunger strike in Israeli prisons. Grave concerns have been expressed for the lives of the prisoners by UN independent rights experts, who on Thursday, called on the Israeli Government to completely end the “unlawful practice “ of administrative detention. In a statement, the experts said that Israel continues to detain more than 500 Palestinians – including six children – “without charges, without...

The process of drafting a new constitution for Syria has been “a big disappointment” UN Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen concluded on Friday. Following the end of discussions in Geneva, a consensus on how to move forward was not achieved, he added. The drafting process between Government and opposition Co-Chairs of the Syrian Constitutional Committee (Small Drafting Body) and civil society began on Monday and was led by Mr. Pedersen. The aim was to produce a text that would help...

Independent UN human rights experts on Monday strongly condemned the decision by the Israeli Minister of Defence to designate six Palestinian human rights and civil society groups, as terrorist organisations. In a joint statement, the experts called the decision “a frontal attack on the Palestinian human rights movement, and on human rights everywhere.” “Silencing their voices is not what a democracy adhering to well-accepted human rights and humanitarian standards would do”, they add...

Geir Pedersen reported on the sixth session of the Committee’s so-called “Small Body”, which he convened last week in Geneva. The hope was that the 45 men and women – who represent the Syrian government, opposition and civil society – would draft a text that would help support a peaceful future for their country after more than a decade of war. Working mechanism needed However, they were unable to move from submitting and discussing initial drafts to developing a productive textual...

Masami Ogata is a survivor of Minamata Disease, a debilitating illness caused by industrial mercury poisoning, which originated in the Japanese town of the same name in the 1950s. As a UN conference on preventing future poisoning outbreaks gets underway, we hear Mr. Ogata’s story. As a storyteller at the Minamata Disease Municipal Museum, Mr. Ogata helps to keep alive the memory of what is considered to be one of the most serious Japanese pollution incidents of the Twentieth Century. The...

Human rights defenders in Afghanistan report that they are now enduring a “climate of fear”, threats, and becoming increasingly desperate over conditions in the country, an independent UN expert said on Wednesday. Stating that “the threat is very real”, Mary Lawlor, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, called for an urgent coordinated response from the international community. “Defenders tell me of direct threats, including gendered threats against women, of beatings...

Israel’s plan to build thousands of new homes for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem has drawn strong condemnation from two independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. Settlement expansion “tramples” on human rights law, Special Rapporteurs Michael Lynk and Balakrishnan Rajagopal said in a statement on Wednesday. Solidifying a permanent presence Nearly 700,000 Israeli settlers are now living in illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the...

Some women and girls being recruited in Viet Nam to serve as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, are suffering sexual abuse and torture, leading a group of UN independent human rights experts on Thursday to call on both nations to curb human trafficking. “We are seeing traffickers targeting Vietnamese women and girls living in poverty, many of whom are already vulnerable and marginalized. Traffickers operate with impunity”, they said in a statement. After signing on with labour...

Nearly 23 million people, or 55 per cent of the Afghan population, are estimated to be in crisis or experiencing emergency levels of food insecurity between now and March of next year. Speaking to journalists in New York, the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General pointed to reports that isolated clashes and violence affecting civilians and resulting in casualties continued countrywide this week. In Jalalabad, in Nangarhar Province, gunfire directed at de facto authorities resulted in...