Noon Briefings

The Secretary-General was shocked at reports of remarks attributed to Myanmar Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.  He urges all leaders in Myanmar to take a unified stance against incitement to hatred and to promote communal harmony.

The UN Central Emergency Response Fund has released over $9 million in funding to coverprovide for the immediate needs of those affected by a strong earthquake that recently struck Papua New Guinea.  The event follows a February earthquake that had left some 270,000 people needing assistance..

Humanitarian operations for over 800,000 people have resumed in Rann town, in Nigeria’s Borno State following several United Nations security assessments, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.  However, aid workers have not yet been authorized to stay overnight.

The Global Report on Food Crises, published today, sounded an alarm regarding surging levels of acute hunger.  Some 124 million people in 51 countries were affected by acute food insecurity in 2017 — 11 million more than in 2016.

Since 11 March, the United Nations estimates that more than 50,000 people have left eastern Ghouta, Syria.  Amid visits from United Nations teams in recent days, most of the existing shelters do not have the capacity or infrastructure to accommodate the large number of people arriving in rural areas near Damascus.

The situation in the Central African Republic was deteriorating, with violence spreading fast and record numbers of people displaced, the Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs told Member States after a recent visit, emphasizing that existing urgent and critical needs were deepening.

Humanitarian needs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have doubled over the last year, with 13 million people in need of assistance, in a context of persistent insecurity and bureaucratic impediments, the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator told the Security Council today after a visiting mission.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is increasingly alarmed at the plight of thousands of Central African refugees who have fled to southern Chad since late 2017.  The influx is the biggest since 2014, and is overwhelming the ability of humanitarian agencies to respond.

A United Nations human rights office report issued today states there are strong grounds to believe that some of the people detained in Mexico in the early stages of the investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students were arbitrarily detained and tortured and those serious violations were covered up.  

Ending a two-day mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock and Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Sigrid Kaag called on the international community to urgently tackle the crisis in the country, where over 13 million people need humanitarian aid.