Looking back on a challenging 2021, the UN Resident Coordinator in Guatemala pays tribute to his colleague and long-time former Resident Coordinator Rebeca Arias Flores, who passed away sadly on the 19th of May after recently retiring from a 30-year career in the UN system.
In July 2021, the UN General Assembly highlighted global concerns over “the exponential spread and proliferation of hate speech” around the world and adopted a resolution on “promoting inter-religious and intercultural dialogue and tolerance in countering hate speech”. The resolution recognizes the need to counter discrimination, xenophobia and hate speech and calls on all relevant actors, including States, to increase their efforts to address this phenomenon, in line with international human rights law. The resolution proclaimed 18 June as the International Day for Countering Hate Speech, which will be marked for the first time in 2022.
Droughts have become an urgent global issue. Aggravated by human-induced climate change and desertification, they threaten all types of countries, negatively impacting food security and socioeconomic development. And prospects are not reassuring as droughts may affect over three-quarters of the world’s population by 2050.
Originally constructed in 1976 as a supertanker and converted into a floating storage and offloading facility a decade later, the vessel holds an estimated 1.14 million barrels of light crude oil. Maintenance operations were suspended on the tanker in 2015 as the civil war escalated.
United Nations Resident Coordinator for Sri Lanka, Ms. Hanaa Singer-Hamdy outlined the urgent funding asks of the Joint Humanitarian Needs and Priorities Plan (HNP Plan) which was launched today in coordination with development and humanitarian partners in Sri Lanka.
In the early 1990s Uzbekistan, the double landlocked country in Central Asia, had just emerged as an independent state from the Soviet Union. With a fragile economy and developing industrial sector, these were challenging times for the newly autonomous country. Dr. Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan, remembers this period well, having spent the early days of his career working for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in the Regional Office for Central Asia. In Uzbekistan he witnessed first-hand the challenges in expanding healthcare and other essential services.
The celebration to mark the thirty-year anniversary of Bosnia and Herzegovina's accession to the United Nations began last week with a formal programme at the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo and continued with the second edition of the UN's #ImagineChange Festival at the Square of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Trg BiH).
