Maj. Gen. Cheryl Pearce of Australia has been the force commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus since 2018. The authors argue that powerful Western nations need to let the UN Secretariat choose the leaders of peacekeeping posts rather than exert their own preferences. LOEY FELIPE/UN PHOTO
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 tolerated the politician’s deceit.
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.
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 meaningful to humanity, the essayist says. ESKINDER DEBEBE/UN PHOTO
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 emergency measures in the case on Jan. 23, 2020.
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
A street scene in Kabul, taken by the author, who is originally from Boston but worked for many years in Afghanistan. A Christmas she spent in the capital one year, she writes, was the most touching and surprising she had ever experienced.
The Christmas spirit finally found me drinking whisky on a rooftop in Kabul.
People from South Sudan’s Gumbo-Sherikat neighborhood in the capital of Juba meet in a UN-led gathering to build peace, after the signing of the 2018 agreement to end the country’s civil war. So far, the pact has not been carried out, but the author describes another potential path to peace for the world’s youngest nation. ERIC KANALSTEIN/UN PHOTO
The Netherlands hosted a conference with governments and the financial sector on human trafficking and slavery, June 2019. Sexual extortion, or “sextortion,” the author says, is a crime against humanity that is not only part of human trafficking transactions but is also found in other arenas of life, from academia to the workplace.
As human-rights protections slip worldwide, the authors argue that the Inter-Parliamentary Union, in a group photo, October 2019, above, can establish a “critical link between international agreements and domestic progress on human-rights issues.”
