When the international pledging conference to rebuild a devastated Gaza ended in Cairo over the weekend – the third such conference in less than six years – the lingering question among donors was: is this the last of it or are there more assaults to come? U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon implicitly warned of the futility […]

The much-ballyhooed one-day Climate Summit next week is being hyped as one of the major political-environmental events at the United Nations this year. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged over 120 of the world’s political and business leaders, who are expected to participate in the talk-fest, to announce significant and substantial initiatives, including funding commitments, “to […]

At the height of his election campaign last October, Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist leader, briefly set aside his spiritual aspirations when he told a surprised audience that economic development should take precedence over religion. “Toilets before temples,” pleaded Modi, the newly-elected prime minister of India, a country which has been in the throes of […]

The post U.N. Vows to Eliminate Open Defecation by 2025 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The United Nations, which is trying to help resolve the widespread shortage of water in the developing world, is faced with a growing new problem: the use of water as a weapon of war in ongoing conflicts. The most recent examples are largely in the Middle East and Africa, including Iraq, Egypt, Israel (where supplies to […]

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A U.N. working group mandated to formulate a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the post-2015 development agenda is being accused of bypassing water and sanitation as a basic human right: a right long affirmed in a General Assembly resolution adopted back in July 2010. A letter of protest signed by 77 non-governmental organisations […]

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The world is slowly, but painfully, moving towards the formal recognition of the existence of a third gender besides male and female. “The rights of transgender people – to their own identity and to access to health, education, work, housing and other rights – are being increasingly widely recognised,” Charles Radcliffe, chief of the Global […]

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At a political level, when the United Nations speaks of a “high seas alliance”, it is probably a coalition of countries battling modern piracy in the Indian Ocean. But at the environmental level, the High Seas Alliance (HSA) is a partnership of more than 27 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), plus the International Union for the Conservation […]

The post U.N. Aims at Treaty to Protect Marine Biodiversity appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The two-day, much-ballyhooed Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) in the Netherlands, which concluded Tuesday, was politically haunted by the upheaval in Ukraine – the former Soviet republic that renounced some 1,800 of its nuclear weapons in one of the world’s most successful disarmament exercises back in 1994. Still, it raised a question that has remained unanswered: […]

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The 45-member U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) concluded its annual 10-day session Saturday with several key pronouncements, including on reproductive health, women’s rights, sexual violence, female genital mutilation (FGM) and the role of women in implementing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The heaviest round of applause came when the Commission specifically called […]

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U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, conscious of the stark ineffectiveness of the Security Council over the upheaval in Ukraine, is engaged in a round of shuttle diplomacy with Russian and Ukrainian leaders to help resolve the crisis in that region. “The secretary-general is desperately trying to create a U.N. role in the spreading dispute,” said one […]

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