What's New

Whether at home, at work, in the streets or even online, women and girls across the world remain highly vulnerable to gender-based violence, something which the COVID-19 pandemic has only magnified, six senior UN women leaders said on Thursday. 

The top officials, who included Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed and heads of key UN agencies, examined ways to end this “invisible emergency” during a roundtable discussion held from UN Headquarters in New York. 

On Sunday afternoon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Antonio Guterres, will arrive in Lebanon for a state visit.

At this challenging time for Lebanon, this will be a visit of solidarity during which the Secretary-General will reaffirm the support of the entire UN family – from our political teams and peacekeepers to our humanitarian aid workers and development professionals – for the country and its people. 

The Omicron variant is “probably” now present in most of the world’s countries and it would be a mistake to dismiss the COVID-19 strain as “mild”, said the head of the UN health agency (WHO) on Tuesday.

The President of the General Assembly on Tuesday announced a New Year resolution on vaccine equity, calling on governments to come together on this issue ahead of a major event in mid-January.

“Unless we can vaccinate the world, there is no way out of this. You see different types of variants coming out, and this is going to continue,” Abdulla Shahid told journalists in New York.  

The UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), held last month in Glasgow, was defined by a “reinvigorated multilateralism”, a top UN official said on Tuesday during an online discussion on how the summit’s outcomes will impact climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Corruption spreads through societies and erodes people’s trust in leaders and institutions, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told an anti-corruption conference on Monday, stressing that “greed over need, harms us all”. 

Around two months into a six-month residency at Dubai Expo, the UN Hub has already attracted a large number of visitors, including several delegations from UN Member States. Dena Assaf, the UN Resident Coordinator for the UAE, and Deputy Commissioner-General of the UN at Expo, says that the event is a unique opportunity to highlight the aims and messages of the Organization.

The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to halt two decades of global progress towards Universal Health Coverage, according to reports released on Sunday from the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Bank, which reveal more than half a billion people are being pushed into extreme poverty because they have to pay for health services out of their own pockets.

Despite significant progress since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 73 years ago, the COVID pandemic has “fed a frightening rise in inequalities”, and laid bare “many of our failures to consolidate the advances made”, said UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet, in a message marking Human Rights Day.

Features of the new COVID-19 variant Omicron, including the extent to which it will spread, and the sheer number of mutations, suggest that it could have a major impact on the course of the pandemic, but it’s still too early to say for sure.