Latest news on the Asia-Pacific region from the United Nations

The UN chief condemned on Friday the latest ballistic missile launch by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), calling on Pyongyang to resume dialogue leading towards sustainable peace and a nuclear weapons-free Korean Peninsula.

The UN food agency in Afghanistan announced on Friday that a lack of funds has forced deep cuts to life-saving assistance in March for at least four million people.

Violence resulting from the brutal military coup is continuing inside Myanmar on an “alarming scale” the UN Special Envoy told a meeting of the General Assembly on Thursday.

UN-appointed independent rights experts on Myanmar have urged social media companies to do more to resist the military junta’s “online campaign of terror”.

Nepal is due to graduate from its current status, as one of the world’s least developed countries, in 2026. Subhash Nepali, an economist in the UN Resident Coordinator’s Office in Nepal, has seen the economic progress made in the country, where he was born and raised.

UN humanitarian coordinators have deployed to Vanuatu to help with the aid response, a week since back-to-back tropical cyclones and a 6.5 magnitude earthquake hit the Pacific island nation.

Afghanistan under the Taliban remains the “most repressive country in the world [for] women’s rights”, the senior UN official in Kabul told the Security Council on Wednesday, while nevertheless voicing a nuanced position on the importance of continuing to engage with the group.

The Philippines violated the rights of women victims of sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the Second World War by failing to redress the continuous discrimination and suffering they have endured, a UN women’s rights committee said in a decision published on Wednesday. 

One third of women in Tajikistan are subjected to violence by their husbands, but very few cases are reported. Social and legal support, provided through the joint EU/UN Spotlight Initiative, is helping affected women to protect their rights.

Six months after the devastating floods in Pakistan, humanitarians have reached more than seven million people with food and other essential services, the United Nations has reported. 

Experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council have expressed concern over reports of increased militarization and intimidation surrounding a multi-billion-dollar urban development and tourism project in Indonesia. 

The Myanmar military has continuously used arbitrary lethal violence against its own people amid an expanding humanitarian emergency, and a worsening economic crisis, the UN rights chief told the Human Rights Council on Monday.

Two years since a military coup in Myanmar, the UN rights office, OHCHR, warned on Friday that the generals’ “scorched earth” policy had left thousands of civilians dead, 80 per cent of townships impacted by fighting and the army “stretched so thin” on the ground, that it resorts to airstrikes.