Chronic divisive rhetoric and genocide denial in Bosnia and Herzegovina are contributing to polarization and hindering prospects for national and regional stability and prosperity, a senior peacekeeping official told the Security Council today during a briefing on recent developments.
The United Nations team in Madagascar is helping authorities to address record-high food insecurity and surging severe acute malnutrition caused by droughts, sandstorms and caterpillar plagues in the south of the island. Authorities and the United Nations launched a flash appeal in January for nearly $76 million.
Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a de facto frozen conflict, where political leaders pursue wartime goals, generate divisions and push nationalistic agendas, the top United Nations official overseeing implementation of the 1995 Dayton Accords told the Security Council today, warning that hate speech and genocide denial risk eclipsing hard-won democratic gains.
A report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan finds increasing reports of torture in that country’s detention facilities. Almost a third of those detained for security or terrorism-related offences reported torture or other ill-treatment.
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Jordan launched one of the world’s first COVID-19 vaccination drives for refugees on 14 January. An Iraqi woman in the city of Irbid was the first registered refugee to be vaccinated as part of Jordan’s national campaign.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warns that 250,000 children have been displaced by the crisis in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, Mozambique. UNICEF is concerned that safe water, sanitation and hygiene services are insufficient to meet the growing needs in overcrowded temporary accommodation centres and host communities.
Children make up nearly half the people who have fled Ethiopia’s Tigray region for Sudan, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports. Their most urgent needs are clean water and sanitation, as well as child-protection and gender-based violence services for the most vulnerable and at-risk refugees, the agency says.
The Security Council decided to extend for one year its authorization to States working as part of the multinational stabilization force in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and heard a briefing by the high representative in that country, with voting results announced virtually in accordance with the temporary silence procedure adopted for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched the Food Coalition, a multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral alliance that aims to ensure global food access and increase the resilience of agri-food systems. The pandemic could add 132 million more people to the world's undernourished in 2020, FAO says, on top of the 690 million hungry people in 2019.
In Nepal, the United Nations team is helping the Government cope with the COVID-19 pandemic by supporting the repatriation of Nepali migrants returning from the Gulf and Southeast Asia at entry and transit points, with quarantine sites and isolation centres. Some 25,000 returnees are expected in this first phase.
