Secretary-General António Guterres holding a global town hall meeting with United Nations staff members, Jan. 17, 2019. The authors cite instances of tough resistance to Guterres’s systemwide gender parity strategy, including from certain staff unions. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO
Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, in the Security Council chamber, Oct. 18, 2018. She left a bruising mark on the UN, having criticized it constantly and lectured other countries, yet some of her peers admired her. RICK BAJORNAS/UN PHOTO
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, right, and Kingston Rhodes, chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, a regulatory body of the UN, April 13, 2017. Rhodes, from Sierra Leone, retired a few weeks early from his job in December, amid allegations he had engendered a hostile workplace for women.
Amid a busy December, when the United Nations was focusing on important conferences on climate change and migration and year-end holidays loomed, a case of harassment that never got the traction it arguably deserved ended in a traditional UN way: it disappeared.
On Dec. 10, the Twitter account for the Yemen embassy in Washington showed President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi of Yemen, right, leaving the US for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he lives in exile. It said he was in “very good health.”
A project of the UN Development Program has enabled the Aatral Arasi Palmyrah Crafts, a group in Sri Lanka, to grow. The author of this essay says, however, that in postwar societies, the private sector must play a major role in rebuilding societies to ensure lasting economic recovery.
Another year of Secretary-General António Guterres’s reform of the peace and security pillar of the United Nations is ending without fully addressing a main obstacle to peacebuilding in conflict-torn countries under UN intervention: sustainable economic recovery.
A trip by the members of the UN Security Council, above background, to the Congo in October 2018 included meeting with female political candidates (front rows) who are competing in the country’s Dec. 23 elections. Recent murders of UN peacekeepers in the Congo raise the question as to whether the Council is clear on the consequences of peacekeepers becoming parties to a conflict. MICHAEL ALI/Monusco
A memorial service was held for the six peacekeepers from Malawi and one from Tanzania who died during clashes with the ADF militia in the Congo on Nov. 15, 2018. Seventeen members of the same UN force intervention brigade were killed nearly a year ago battling the ADF. MIRIAM ASMANI/MONUSCO
United Nations peacekeepers working for the mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were killed by a militia in a jungle in North Kivu Province on Nov. 15, leaving seven soldiers dead: six Malawians and one Tanzanian. Ten were injured.
President Trump entering the UN General Assembly hall before addressing the annual debate, Sept. 25, 2018. In his second speech to the UN Assembly as president, Trump was even more adamant than last year about emphasizing America’s “sovereignty,” claiming this year that the country “will always choose independence and cooperation over global governance, control and domination.” RICK BAJORNAS/UN PHOTO
Donald Trump, president of the United States, prepares for the first time to address the General Assembly’s annual general debate, Sept. 19, 2017. He is scheduled to speak at the UN this year, starting with a brief meeting on the global drug problem on Sept. 24. MANUEL ELIAS/UN PHOTO
A year after his bombastic debut at the United Nations as president of the United States, Donald Trump returns on Monday, Sept. 24, to lead a US effort to spur global action to stem the narcotics and opioid plagues. Could the US be asking the UN for help this time?
UN chief Antonio Guterres said in comments published Thursday that US power is in decline as Washington loses its ability to impact world events, Anadolu reports.
“I think that the soft power of the United States … is being reduced at the present moment,” Guterres said during an interview with the Atlantic magazine.
Guterres warned the development poses unique challenges for the international community because without Washington there “is no way to solve most of the problems in the world.”
