Latest news on the Asia-Pacific region from the United Nations
- Painting a grim picture of villages being burned to the ground and other “bone-chilling” accounts he heard from Rohingya refugees who fled violence in Myanmar, the UN chief has called on the world to answer their calls for help with real action.
- A United Nations human rights expert on Tuesday urged North Korea to open a dialogue with him in parallel to the ongoing diplomatic efforts being undertaken on peace and denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.
- Rohingya refugees sheltering in Bangladesh will soon have credit card-sized plastic IDs – many possessing, for the first time ever, an individual identity document – providing another level of protection, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
- Myanmar should experience feelings of “shame” after attempting to convince the world that it is willing to take back hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled an “ethnic cleansing campaign” last year, given that “not a single” one has returned officially, the United Nations human rights chief declared on Wednesday.
- Simple shelters that are little more than huts with bamboo sticks and plastic sheeting for walls, and tarpaulins overhead, are serving a very important purpose for refugee women and girls forced to flee their homes to the vast refugee camps of Bangladesh.
- Intense air and ground-based strikes at multiple locations in Syria’s south-western Dara’a governorate has resulted in the “largest displacement” in the area since the conflict began more than seven years ago, the United Nations refugee agency has reported.
- In the wake of dozens of civilian deaths – the most recent, a suicide attack in Jalalabad on Sunday – a high-level United Nations representative on the ground called for “the architects of this appalling crime” to be brought to justice.
- United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres visited Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh on Monday, declaring that “nothing could have prepared me for the scale of the crisis and extent of suffering” he witnessed there.
- United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has applauded Bangladesh for giving a safe haven to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees driven from their homes in Myanmar by systematic and widespread violence.
- The continuing plight of nearly one million Rohingya refugees driven from their homes in Myanmar will be the focus of the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres when he travels to Bangladesh this weekend – the country where they have found safe-haven.
- Artisans in Azerbaijan who practice the traditional art of carpet making are being provided with new business opportunities thanks to a project supported by the UN Development Programme (UNDP).
- United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has welcomed the high-level visit of a delegation from Eritrea to neighbouring Ethiopia which began on Tuesday, as “a first concrete step” in the process of normalizing relations between the two countries.
- The United Nations rights expert on Myanmar is “strongly” recommending that the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigate and prosecute those allegedly responsible for “decades of crimes” in the form a grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law inside the country.