United States

United Nations Children’s Fund Representative (UNICEF) in Nigeria Peter Hawkins calls on those responsible for the mass abduction of girls from a State-run school in Zamfara to release them immediately and for the Government to take steps to ensure their safe release and the safety of other schoolchildren in the country.

The new Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, presented her credentials to the Secretariat and paid a courtesy call on UN Secretary-General António Guterres today.

Following are UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks to the event marking the United States rejoining the Paris Agreement, in New York and online today:

Ten years into Syria’s crisis, humanitarian needs are deepening, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says, with an estimated 13.4 million people requiring protection and assistance, up more than 2 million people from 2020.  Nearly 60 per cent of the population is food insecure.

In north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, United Nations vaccination teams are supporting the Ebola response by rehabilitating treatment centres and boosting contact-tracing capacity, and today began a four-day mission to Guinea to assess the situation in Nzérékoré, where the first Ebola case was reported.

Humanitarian officials are seriously concerned about the rapidly deteriorating food security situation in southern and eastern Madagascar, where more than 1.3 million people face severe hunger.  The third drought in a row is compounding the effects of COVID-19 and the extremely limited access to essential services.

The United Nations team in Indonesia is supporting efforts to vaccinate 80 per cent of the population, over 216 million people, against COVID-19.  Work has begun to bring the country into the COVAX facility, and the World Health Organization helped finalize a vaccine introduction road map and guidelines.

The United Nations and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research hosted an online discussion on how to prioritize actions to recover more equitably from the COVID-19 pandemic.  More than 100 participants from 60 countries attended, including those responsible for $100 billion annually in global research investments.

Following is the transcript of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ press conference, held in New York today:

Pramila Patten, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Sexual Violence in Conflict, today expressed great concern about serious allegations of sexual violence in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, including a high number of alleged rapes in the capital. She called for zero tolerance of sexual violence among all warring parties.