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Certain factors contributing to gender imbalances in some populations have resulted in “missing girls,” like in Vietnam, above, and “disappearing men,” like in Russia. The Covid-19 pandemic will have enduring effects on the imbalances as well.
Normally, the numbers of males and females in...
UN headquarters in New York, during the opening of the General Assembly’s annual debate, above, September 2019. The Generation Equality Forum scheduled for May in Mexico City, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing conference on women’s rights, is likely to be postponed or cancelled. AMANDA...
The UN Security Council’s 15 members held a meeting on March 26, 2020, by videoconference, to discuss the UN political mission in Libya, as the UN headquarters in New York City remains physically off-limits amid the Covid-19 outbreak. But the meetings have not been live-streamed, so other UN...
Secretary-General António Guterres holds a virtual press briefing to appeal for a global cease-fire during the coronavirus pandemic, March 23, 2020. So far, his call has been heard in Cameroon, Philippines, Yemen and parts of Syria. ESKINDER DEBEBE/UN PHOTO
The coronavirus officially hit...
The authors, Samea Shanori, left, and Fiona Shukri, at a pomegranate festival in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. They argue that participation of women in the US-Taliban peace deal will only hurt them without their “methodical, sustained and substantive engagement.”
Afghan women’s...
In Italy, temperature checks. As the coronavirus rages globally and nations say they are waging a war, the United Nations Security Council has not done anything to address the pandemic’s intensifying threat to international peace and security, the author argues.
Although much of the world...
The UNTV studio in New York, where technicians produced a virtual press briefing with Secretary-General António Guterres (on screens), focusing on the coronavirus outbreak, March 19, 2020. Who is next in line to Guterres, should be become suddenly incapacitated? EVAN SCHNEIDER/UN PHOTO
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The Rome international airport, March 12, 2020, right before it closed and the American, Jeffrey Laurenti, got out of Italy. His journey had only begun as he headed to Africa.
Jeffrey Laurenti, an American writer who specializes on the United Nations and international affairs, is a...
Passenger screening at Maya Maya International Airport, Brazzaville, Republic of Congo. As a continent, Africa currently has the lowest number of reported coronavirus cases, but the World Health Organization has now released evidence of local community transmissions for the first time. ELOMBAT D...
The state of affairs in New York City, March 18, 2020, as the metropolis practices social distancing, self-isolating and working from home. Our new podcast episode reveals how four ambassadors who represent their country at the UN are navigating digital diplomacy. EVAN SCHNEIDER/UN PHOTO
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Grammy Award-winning singer and a goodwill ambassador for Unicef, Angélique Kidjo performing at an event for International Women’s Day, March 2020. This year was supposed to be a time for heralding women’s rights, but so far that is not working out. ESKINDER DEBEBE/UN PHOTO
This year was...
The UN’s main lobby in New York, March 11, 2020. By Friday evening, March 13, the UN announced that virtually all personnel working at New York headquarters were being ordered to telecommute for four weeks, after a Filipino diplomat confirmed that a colleague had Covid-19. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO...
A Filipino diplomat sent a letter to fellow diplomats on March 12 that a colleague at the country’s mission to the UN had tested positive for the coronavirus. The UN says it is following up but has not said it is closing the building. The scene above, March 11. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO
As the...
In the United Nations Security Council, experts briefing the members remotely from South Sudan. The Council has test-run a simulated cybermeeting, prepping for a potential shutdown of the UN building amid the coronavirus outbreak in New York. ESKINDER DEBEBE/UN PHOTO
The United Nations...
Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, in Geneva, December 2018. She has released a long-awaited database of companies that are helping Israel to develop Jewish settlements in Palestine-occupied territory. US Secretary of State Pompeo reiterated his “outrage” last week...
Striking on International Women’s Day, 2019 in London. One way to gauge whether a society that has been at war will ever be peaceful is to see how it treats women and girls at home.
Nearly 700 people, many of them young adults and students, flocked to the United Nations recently to...
Zhang Jun, China’s envoy to the United Nations, in the Security Council, Sept. 17, 2019. Zhang has been in the post for less than a year and now leads the Council as president in March, just as the world reels from the coronavirus outbreak. ARIANA LINDQUIST/UN PHOTO
Over the past year...
UN Secretary-General António Guterres received an honorary degree from the New School university in New York City on Feb. 17. He spoke at length on “women and power,” blaming patriarchy for the injustices inflicted on women and girls. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO
With International Women’s Day,...
UN Secretary-General António Guterres received an honorary degree from the New School university in New York City on Feb. 17. He spoke at length on “women and power,” blaming patriarchy for the injustices inflicted on women and girls. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO
With International Women’s Day,...
Richard Grenell, until recently US ambassador to Germany, is now acting national director of intelligence. He has worked for a Moldovan politician whom the US has accused of corruption, and the author of this op-ed, a former Moldovan ambassador to the UN, says that “knowingly or not,” Grenell...
A participant at the 2019 annual women’s rights meeting at the UN in New York. This year’s preparations for the gathering, held in early March, have already forced diplomats working on a political declaration to take sides in promoting or excluding certain rights. AMANDA VOISARD/UN WOMEN
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US Ambassador Kelly Craft voting in the UN Security Council on a women, peace and security resolution, Oct. 29, 2019. She and her husband, the coal billionaire Joseph Craft, have donated money recently to a political action committee dedicated to re-electing Trump.
Kelly Craft has taken...
A health worker in Togo, supported by the US, discussing family planning choices with local women. Trump’s new budget proposal would continue to restrict money for reproductive health sharply, “to suit the antichoice crowd” in the US electorate, the writer says. USAID
Whether or not...
Secretary of State Pompeo and Nikki Haley, the US envoy to the UN at the time, announcing the US withdrawal from the Human Rights Council, June 19, 2018. The move by the US, the author says, has enabled Russia and China to destroy the global human-rights system.
For the last decade,...
Clarice Gargard, a Dutch columnist for a large newspaper in the Netherlands, has described receiving online threats and attacks in comments related to her work. The remarks, she says, are mostly related to her “giving a different perspective on society.”
When Reporters Without Borders...
Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, holds a map as he addresses the Security Council session focusing on the new Trump proposal for the Mideast, Feb. 11, 2020. Abbas described the proposed land configurations by the United States and Israel as resembling “Swiss cheese.”...
Solar panels installed on the roof of the United Nations in New York, Aug. 27, 2019. The complexity of the UN system makes it difficult for outsiders to assess its success in reducing its climate footprint. Moreover, some UN staff want the organization to be more of a global role model for...
Secretary-General António Guterres stressed four threats to global progress for humankind in his State of the World speech in January 2020. Negotiations on writing a declaration to mark the UN’s 75th birthday could pinpoint ways to improve multilateral governance to make the anniversary truly...
Eighteen-year-old Millicent lives at an orphanage and school for formerly trafficked children, in Kete Krachi, near Lake Volta. As a child, she had been forced for years to do such labor as smoking fish captured from the lake. She would ask herself, When will I be rescued from this mess? Now she...
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of Palestine, arrives to address the Security Council on the new Trump plan for the Mideast, Feb. 11, 2020. The meeting was not as fraught as it could have been, given the outright rejection by Abbas and many others to the US proposal. ESKINDER DEBEBE/UN PHOTO
...Hugh Dugan, an ex-diplomat at the US mission to the UN, is a new Trump appointee in the National Security Council.
Hugh Dugan, a retired United States Foreign Service officer and former US delegate to the United Nations, has been appointed to the US National Security Council as special...
Belgium’s ambassador to the UN, Marc Pecsteen de Buytswerve, being interviewed in his office in Midtown Manhattan by Stéphanie Fillion, a PassBlue reporter, Jan. 30, 2020. The country is rotating president of the Security Council in February, managing a tight schedule that includes a meeting on...
The Women’s Day march in Istanbul, 2017. The leaders of Brazil, Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all friends of Trump, have been steadily eroding the rights of women. In Turkey, for example, a bill has been introduced to grant amnesty to men convicted of statutory rape if they marry their...
President Trump with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Jan. 28, 2020, in the White House, unveiling details of the Trump administration’s Mideast peace plan, after keeping it secret for three years. It disregards any attempt to ensure a fully sovereign state for the Palestinians. SHEALAH...
Susan Rice, US envoy to the UN from 2009 to 2013, with some of her fellow ambassadors, clockwise from left: Peter Wittig of Germany; Mark Lyall Grant of Britain; Li Baodong of China; Vitaly Churkin of Russia; and Gérard Araud of France, June 9, 2010. A study by a German scholar of US...
The Democratic presidential debate in Iowa, Jan. 14, 2020, Drake University. Few of the candidates have uttered the words “United Nations,” but a close reading of their speeches and other sources reveals a range of positions on “how they would operate in the international system,” the author...
Melissa Fleming, the new head of the UN’s Department of Global Communications, in New York, speaking at a Holocaust memorial ceremony, marking 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Jan. 27, 2020. Fleming, who is from the United States, was most recently the spokesperson for the UN refugee...
The annual Commission on the Status of Women, 2019. This year’s meeting, March 9-20, could be as contentious on such sensitive topics as reproductive health rights as they were last year. This time, however, the session reviews the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for...
Jonathan Moore, the new head of International Organization Affairs, a US State Department bureau that works closely with the US mission to the UN.
The naming of Jonathan Moore, a senior United States Foreign Service officer, to the position of Acting Assistant Secretary of State for...
Mohamed Siad Doualeh, the ambassador of Djibouti to the UN. He contends that his country, not Kenya, should be the candidate running for the African bloc’s current open seat on the Security Council. China’s influence has been shadowing the process.
Djibouti is vying with Kenya to win an...
Fannie Munlin, the chair of the NGO Executive Committee, the liaison between the civil society world and the UN. She manages the needs and demands of 1,600 nongovernmental organizations, including their egos. It seems to come easily to her. DULCIE LEIMBACH
Fannie Munlin has led a...
The International Court of Justice held hearings in December 2019 in a new case filed by The Gambia accusing Myanmar of genocide against the Rohingya people. Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader, defended her country in the hearings. Now, the court is expected to issue a ruling on...
A detail from a mural being painted on a memorial for victims of Guatemala’s civil war, San Juan Comalapa, 2018. As UN-led global commemorations push ahead on women’s rights and equality in 2020, a set of six “action coalition” themes was announced by UN Women. Not everyone is happy with the...
In 2017, a contingent of UN peacekeepers in Haiti holding a closing ceremony to their operations and the start of peacekeepers’ overall withdrawal from the country that year. New research focusing on how sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers in Haiti has affected women and girls there...
This year, the status of women on many fronts, from political involvement to personal justice, will be evaluated in international forums. It is widely recognized, for starters, that women in poor countries need more access to information on basic health care for themselves and their families....
President Trump, with Vice President Pence, White House advisers and military personnel, speaking on Jan. 8, 2020, about Iran’s missile strikes against Iraqi military bases housing US troops, days after Trump ordered the killing of Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. Much of the current crisis,...
Hicham Alaoui was a Moroccan prince who left the monarchy as an adult and is now an outspoken advocate for reform in Morocco, working from his academic base in the United States. In a wide-ranging interview, he delves into his break from the monarchy as well as the failures of the Arab Spring...
Secretary-General António Guterres arriving at the Security Council meeting on upholding the United Nations Charter, Jan. 9, 2020. The debate was scheduled long before the recent US-Iran attacks, but those alarming actions were referred to directly or alluded to by member states as...
Ambassador Dang Dinh Quy of Vietnam, speaking to media on Jan. 2, 2020, as his country assumes the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council in its first month as an elected member. In the Council, it plans to ally with another current Southeast Asian member, Indonesia.
With tensions...
A UN Development Program workshop on gender and disaster-risk reduction related to climate change, Cambodia, August 2019. In an essay, an expert on the UN development system says it “cries out for reform” but is stuck in inertia. MANUTH BUTH/UNDP CAMBODIA
GENEVA — Like his predecessors,...
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