Latest news on the Asia-Pacific region from the United Nations
- New criminal laws in Brunei that impose the death penalty for same-sex relationships, adultery and childbirth out of marriage, “breach international human rights norms”, and should be suspended or repealed said the heads of two United Nations agencies on Thursday.
- Proposed changes to Brunei’s penal code to incorporate punishments under a strict interpretation of Islamic law - including death by stoning - should be halted, the UN’s top human rights official, Michelle Bachelet, said on Monday.
- Nations across Asia and the Pacific need to take bold action to ensure empowerment, inclusiveness and equality if the region is to realize the ambitious 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a major UN conference has heard.
- The UN’s top rights official on Wednesday rejected claims by Sri Lankan officials that she distanced herself from a report on the country and instructed her staff to be more “cautious” in future, before stressing her commitment to justice for victims of grave abuses during the civil war.
- In the wake of a horrific mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has announced his intention to launch a UN action plan for the safeguarding of religious sites, declaring that “mosques and all places of prayer and contemplation should be safe havens, not sites of terror.”
- The Fall Armyworm pest is continuing to sweep across the globe, having moved eastwards from their native Americas, onto Africa, before arriving in Asia only last summer, where they now threaten to cost farmers from India to Thailand, billions of dollars in lost production.
- More than 70 have died and dozens are missing in Indonesia’s eastern province of Papua, which was hit by flash floods and landslides on Sunday, and more than 4,000 have reportedly been displaced.
- The UN Secretary-General António Guterres has urged the international community to ‘stand united against anti-Muslim hatred’ following a mass shooting in New Zealand on Friday targeting two mosques, which has left at least 49 dead and many others wounded, some critically.
- The UN Special Representative in Afghanistan, Tadamichi Yamamoto, hailed on-going efforts made towards peace and the engagement of women and youth across the country, but warned the Security Council on Monday that “daunting challenges” remain.
- The UN is calling for some $120 million to provide life-saving humanitarian aid, desperately needed by 3.8 million North Koreans, as it releases its 2019 Needs and Priorities Plan for the country.
- With around half a million in effect, stateless Rohingya refugee children living in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar camp, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) chief stressed on Friday that the international community must address their “untenable situation” and “invest in this generation”.
- With over 3,800 civilian women, children and men killed in just one year, Afghanistan has hit yet another “deeply disturbing and wholly unacceptable” record, according to a new report issued on Sunday by the UN political mission in the country (UNAMA) and the UN human rights office (OHCHR).
- United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres congratulated the Philippines on Friday for establishing a government body to push forward the formal creation of an autonomous region.