In this week’s UN Catch-Up, we’re checking in with the World Health Organization for the latest key COVID-19 developments, including an equitable vaccine distribution milestone.

In this week’s UN Catch-Up from Geneva, we’ll find out why we should all be concerned about the container ship that’s been making waves in the Suez Canal.  

Also – the Sahel attack on civilians that’s prompted a protection call from the UN refugee agency…the latest on the Myanmar crisis and help for child victims of the insurgency in northern Mozambique.  

With Daniel Johnson and Solange Behoteguy-Cortes from UN Geneva. 

In this week’s show, we’re celebrating seven years without polio in India and finding out how it was done. Could the lessons learned help to overcome COVID vaccine hesitancy?  

Also - the UN’s human rights office OHCHR announces a probe into grave rights abuses in Ethiopia’s Tigray region; a call for solidarity for the tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees who’ve lost everything in a huge camp fire in Bangladesh; a call for an emergency summit to stop the violence in Myanmar and the latest global COVID data from the UN World Health Organization. 

With Daniel Johnson and Solange Behoteguy-Cortes from UN Geneva.

In this week’s show, we’re getting the latest expert advice from the UN health agency on what to make of clotting concerns surrounding COVID vaccines. We’ll also hear about a mounting death toll among protesters in Myanmar and a good news story from Cambodia, thanks to UNAIDS, where the agency has had to innovate to respond to the challenges facing people with HIV during the pandemic. 

With Daniel Johnson and Solange Behoteguy-Cortes, from UN Geneva. 

In this week’s show, we’re covering the disastrous impact of COVID-19 in DPR Korea (widely known as North Korea) as told to the Human Rights Council; violence in South Sudan that’s the worst since the onset of the civil war in December 2013 – and, we’ll hear about war photographer Giles Clarke’s moving portrait campaign showing some of Yemen’s displaced millions, in partnership with OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 

With Daniel Johnson, Solange Behoteguy-Cortes and Alpha Diallo from UN Geneva.

In this week’s show, we’re covering UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet’s appeal for an end to violence in Myanmar, a call by the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization to boost the COVID-19 vaccine rollout to developing countries, and a new tragedy involving human traffickers and migrants sailing from Djibouti to Yemen.

And we’ll be hearing about the plight of detainees in Syria’s prisons and detention centres 10 years since the civil war began - and international efforts to get them out, in an interview with UN-appointed independent rights investigator Hanny Megally.

With Daniel Johnson and Solange Behoteguy-Cortes from UN Geneva.

In this week’s show we’re covering: Belarus, Eritrea and the US at the Human Rights Council, during the first week of its month-long new session in Geneva.  

And after gunmen abducted around 40 students and teachers from a boarding school in rural Nigeria, an interview with UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) country representative Peter Hawkins; such attacks are a way of life, he tells us... not forgetting closing comments from regular guests Solange Behoteguy-Cortes and Alpha Diallo.  

This week we cover the top stories from across the UN, including: an update on COVID-19 variants from the World Health Organization (WHO), an alert over a new Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a the first-ever woman chief of the World Trade Organization (WTO) who hails from Africa – another groundbreaker. 

Stay with us too for an interview with top rights expert Fionnuala Ni Alouain, who throws light on the miserable situation for thousands of mainly women and children with links to ISIL extremists who are stuck in camps in Syria’s northeast ... and not forgetting a very welcome appearance from regular guests Solange Behoteguy-Cortes and Alpha Diallo.  

In this week’s show, the week’s top stories from the UN covering new coronavirus developments and Myanmar at the Human Rights Council - we also hear how COVID-19 has had a “profound” impact on cancer care everywhere from a World Health Organization (WHO) expert, who explains what that has meant for sufferers - and doctors grappling with a “treatment trade-off” and questions over vaccination…

And, not forgetting piercing insight from regular guests Solange Behoteguy-Cortes and Alpha Diallo. Thanks for listening. 

In this week’s 15-minute catch-up, we hear from the UN Refugee Agency on efforts to stop human traffickers from exploiting vulnerable people who’ve lost their jobs because of COVID-19, plus the week’s top stories from the UN and comments from regular guests Alpha Diallo and Solange Behoteguy-Cortes – with poetry to boot from Uruguayan scribe Eduardo Galeano. Enjoy the show!