UN Interviews

At least 15 people have died in a massive fire at a refugee camp in southern Bangladesh, home mainly to Rohingyas who fled neighbouring Myanmar, and 400 are still missing. 

That’s the latest on Tuesday from UN teams and refugee volunteers on the ground at Cox’s Bazaar, who need to rebuild quickly ahead of the upcoming monsoon, as UN Children’s Fund spokesperson James Elder, tells UN News’s Daniel Johnson. 

When COVID-19 locked down Cambodia last year, people with HIV were afraid that they would lose lifesaving access to regular supplies of anti-retroviral drugs.

Fortunately, that never happened, thanks to a successful new medicines distribution scheme - and a little bit of help from social media platforms too - as UNAIDS country director Vladanka Andreeva told UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

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. 

Ten years into the Syria crisis, humanitarian needs are deepening for millions of people, especially women, children, and the elderly, caught up in fighting through no fault of their own. 

According to humanitarians, over 13 million people across the war-ravaged country are in desperate need of assistance.  

UN News Arabic's Shirin Yaseen, spoke with Muhannad Hadi, Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria Crisis, on what the United Nations is doing and the urgent priorities now. 

He also highlights the need for a political solution to end the crisis. 

Cooing doves, old women watering jasmine trees at dawn and a mother’s kindness are all images that a young Syrian poet and refugee has used to address the loss she feels after fleeing her homeland.

Teenager Amineh Abou Kerech left Syria in 2012, one year into the decade-long conflict which has devastated the country.

She recently participated in an event at the United Nations where she spoke about her poem “Lament for Syria” which won the UK’s prestigious Betjeman Poetry Prize in 2017.

She reads her poem for UN News.

This is Daniel Johnson. Picture the war in Yemen and chances are you’ve come across an image or two by war photo-journalist Giles Clarke. 

On his latest trip to the country that’s been ravaged by six years of war, he based himself in an abandoned school, that’s home to hundreds of displaced people. 

The photographs he took and the stories he heard feature in a campaign to raise awareness about their plight. It’s called Inside Yemen, Portraits of Resilience, and it wasn’t easy, as he explained when I spoke to him for this UN News interview. 

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.

Although women now account for more than a quarter of all parliamentarians worldwide, gender parity is still “far, far away”. 

That’s according to Zeina Hilal of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the UN partner organization working to make parliaments more representative. 

She said despite progress on the political representation front, including nations across Asia, women still face challenges including discrimination, harmful stereotypes, violence and harassment. 

Anshu Sharma has been speaking to Ms. Hillal, who is the Manager of the IPU’s Gender Partnership Programme and Youth Participation Programme.

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. We’ll hear 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.

After 10 years of war in Syria, there are likely tens of thousands of detainees across the country, held by the Government and opposition groups – a traumatic waiting game for the families unsure of their fate. 

In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, rights investigator Hanny Megally from the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, explains what steps the international community is taking to try to resolve the situation – and what obstacles it still faces.