Human rights

In Burkina Faso, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator today has allocated $5.9 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund to address the most urgent needs of displaced people in the country. The new funding will be used to scale up life-saving assistance including food and shelter.

The latest “Hunger Hotspots” report, released by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), projects a serious increase in acute food insecurity in 13 countries and territories in the next five months. Sudan, Palestine, South Sudan, Haiti and Mali are hotspots of the highest concern.

The UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Chad, François Batalingaya, said today the country is in crisis with the east reaching a breaking point. Floods impacted nearly 2 million people last year; 3 million people are struggling to feed themselves. The $1.4 billion Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan is only 9 per cent funded.

The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns that a complete collapse of Internet and data services is paralysing aid operations across Gaza. This is reportedly not a routine outage — but a total failure of Gaza’s digital infrastructure — and most agencies are largely cut off from teams on the ground.

Following are UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s remarks at the opening of the eighteenth session of the Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in New York today:

In Sudan, five members of a UN humanitarian convoy were killed on 2 June and several more were injured during an attack in North Darfur. The joint World Food Programme-UNICEF convoy was made up of 15 trucks, and they had travelled over 1,800 kilometres from Port Sudan, and they were carrying nutrition supplies and food.

In Nigeria, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and humanitarian partners continue to support the response to the devastating floods in the north-central part of the country. More than 500 households were impacted and over 3,000 people displaced.

In Myanmar, a new report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights found that the vast majority of the country’s people are united in their defiance of military authoritarianism and violence.

In Chad, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Thomas Fletcher has allocated $2.5 million from the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to urgently respond to the massive influx of refugees and returnees in the east of the country from Sudan. This brings CERF's total allocation to Chad this year to $16 million.

Following is UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ message for the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, observed on 17 May: