Nigeria

The United Nations welcomes the release of an additional 82 of the Chibok schoolgirls abducted by the Boko Haram insurgent group in April 2014.  The Organization appeals to all Nigerians to fully embrace the liberated girls and provide all necessary support to ensure their reintegration into society.

Nearly 75,000 refugees and migrants, including an estimated 24,600 children, are stranded in Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Western Balkans, and at risk of psychosocial distress from living in a protracted state of limbo, UNICEF warned today. The situation is particularly acute for single mothers and children.

The new Permanent Representative of Nigeria to the United Nations, Tijjani Muhammad Bande, presented his credentials to UN Secretary-General António Guterres today.

Twenty million people across four countries faced starvation and famine if the international community did not act quickly, the United Nations humanitarian chief warned the Security Council today, expressing alarm at the funding gap to meet the needs in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and north-eastern Nigeria.

The following is the full transcript of the joint press conference on the humanitarian crises in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres; Helen Clark, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); Stephen O’Brien, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator; Ertharin Cousin, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP); Carla Mucavi, Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Liaison Office in New York; and Justin Forsyth, Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), held in New York today:

Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, Special Envoy for Yemen, has put out a statement responding to the killing of six women and a girl, as well as the wounding of dozens of people as a result of an alleged air strike that hit a funeral in the Arhab District of Sana’a Governorate on Wednesday afternoon.

The following Security Council press statement was issued today by Council President Volodymyr Yelchenko (Ukraine):

The Secretary-General has issued terms of reference for an impartial, independent mechanism to help investigate and prosecute those responsible for the most serious crimes committed in Syria since March 2011.

In a video message to the opening of the 2017 session of the Conference on Disarmament, the Secretary-General described disarmament as an integral element of a peaceful and prosperous world, spotlighting its potentially important role in ending existing conflicts and preventing the outbreak of new strife.

Three months after Hurricane Matthew made landfall in Haiti, the World Food Programme (WFP) says that the number of people facing hunger and food insecurity in the country’s most affected areas has declined steadily — from approximately 1 million to 400,000.