News on personnel appointments at the UN and related NGOs.
A fact sheet about the New Start treaty of strategic arms between the United States and Russia was released recently by the US State Department as part of the pact’s requirements of data exchange. New Start was ratified in December 2010 by the US Senate to reduce nuclear arsenals in both countries and allow for … Read more
Unesco voted today at its Paris headquarters to admit Palestine as the 195th member to the organization, seriously risking the chance that the agency will lose tens of millions of dollars immediately in contributions from the United States, its biggest donor. The agency also voted in South Sudan as the 194th member. Unesco is popularly … Read more
The International Criminal Court has released the names of four candidates short-listed for the December 2011 election of the chief prosecutor to replace Luis Moreno-Ocampo, an Argentine whose nonrenewable term is expiring in June 2012. The court is the first and only permanent international court that tries people accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and … Read more
When the Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to replace the woeful Human Rights Commission, one novelty assigned to the new body was the Universal Periodic Review, which would, over a period of four years, methodically assess the rights records of all UN member nations for the first time. On Oct.13, the process was … Read more
Martin Kobler, from Germany, arrived in Baghdad recently to take over as Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special representative and head of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (Unami). Much of his work is likely to center on stabilization and development – political as well as economic – as US troops withdraw from the country by the … Read more
Farid Zarif of Afghanistan has been appointed the secretary-general’s special representative for Kosovo. He succeeds Lamberto Zannier of Italy, who led the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (Unmik) until June. Zarif held a number of diplomatic posts in the past, among them Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s. In 1993, he … Read more
The Security Council extended the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known as Minustah, for another year, to Oct. 15, 2012, and agreed to reduce the number of troops there by 2,500 in a unanimously adopted resolution. The number of uniformed personnel in Haiti will be cut from an estimated 13,000 to about … Read more
Aisa Kirabo Kacyira of Rwanda has been named deputy executive director and assistant secretary-general for UN Habitat, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya. She succeeds Inga Björk-Klevby, a Swede who was appointed by Kofi Annan, secretary-general at the time. Kirabo, appointed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is the governor of Eastern Province, the largest province in … Read more
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported in early October that young men are most at risk of becoming victims of homicide in the Caribbean-Central American region and central and southern Africa. Women in those regions are at high risk of death in domestic violence. The agency’s Global Study on Homicide puts the blame … Read more
