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Myanmar doing too little to ensure displaced Rohingya return: UN refugee agency chief

UN agencies together with the Bangladesh authorities have appealed for $877 million to support hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, where conditions are still not conducive for their safe return, UN refugee agency chief Filippo Grandi said on Tuesday. Speaking on the sidelines of the 2020 Joint Response Plan (JRP) launch for 855,000 ethnic Rohingya, […]

‘We can’t stop COVID-19 without protecting health workers’: WHO chief

A shortage of protective equipment is endangering health workers worldwide, warned the World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday, citing “severe and mounting disruption to the global supply” caused by “rising demand, panic buying, hoarding and misuse”. Speaking to the media in Geneva, WHO chief Tedros Adhanon Ghebreyesus said that “we can’t stop COVID-19 without protecting our health workers”. He warned […]

COVID-19: ‘Top priority’ must be on containment, insists WHO’s Tedros

Containing the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic should still be everyone’s “top priority”, UN health agency chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday. In total, 61 countries outside China have reported 8,739 cases of infection with 127 deaths, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General said. Of nearly 90,000 cases globally so far, with around 3,000 fatalities, 90 […]

Fighting discrimination against women is key to beating AIDS

“The struggle to beat AIDS is inseparable from the struggle for women’s rights and from the struggle against all forms of discrimination”. This is the message from Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS, on Zero Discrimination Day, which falls on Sunday March 1. The theme of this year’s Day is the fight against discrimination faced by women and […]

Use of religious beliefs to justify rights violations must be outlawed says UN expert

Laws underpinned by religious conviction that discriminate against women and the  LGBT+ community should be repealed, and gender-based violence carried out in the name of religion by non-State groups must be addressed, an independent UN expert said on Monday in a report presented to the Human Rights Council. “I firmly reject any claim that religious beliefs can be invoked […]

New UN initiative to support financial systems that ‘work better for everyone, everywhere’

From developed to developing countries, no nation is immune from financial “gaps and vulnerabilities”, the President of the UN General Assembly said on Monday. Speaking at the High-level Panel on International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity (FACTI) for Achieving the 2030 Agenda, Tijjani Muhammad-Bande warned that gaps, or the illegal siphoning off of government revenues, “have real consequences in all countries”. The […]