Category: Europe

“Like hundreds of thousands of other people in South-Eastern Türkiye I was fast asleep when the world started to shake. I don’t really know how to describe to anyone who hasn’t felt an earthquake, let alone one of the biggest ever recorded in this region.  It’s just completely surreal. The floor and the walls were shaking, bending, and as we… Read More

“On the eve of the horrific one-year milestone, we have a lot to do and we can do better,” said Martin Griffiths, who also serves as the Emergency Relief Coordinator. 14,000 civilian casualties A recent World Health Organization (WHO) report documented 14,000 civilian casualties, 17.7 million people in need of humanitarian assistance and 7.5 million Ukrainian refugees displaced across Europe.… Read More

Medicines, roofing repair kits, bottled water and solar lamps were offloaded, highlighting the desperate plight of many thousands of people who are unable or unwilling to leave their homes, amid “regular” shelling attacks. On Thursday, a five-lorry inter agency convoy reached the town of Hulyaipole in the Zaporizhia region – home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant – where around… Read More

Tucked away in the southeastern corner of Europe, Moldova’s winters may be drab and harsh, but the road from Ukraine’s border spools out through bare, brown hills like a ribbon of hope. To Larysa, who came from the Donetsk region of Ukraine, the silent heath means safety. It means a pause in the constant barrage of artillery, the whine of… Read More

“We welcome the timely action taken by Switzerland to suspend the children’s return to Bulgaria, in compliance with the Committee’s request for interim measures,” said Ann Skelton, a member of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC). “We also welcome the decision to reassess these children’s situation and their risk of being exposed to cruel, inhuman and degrading… Read More

“Spanish authorities must conduct a full, fair, and effective investigation into these allegations, publish the findings and stop any unlawful interference into the fundamental rights of the Catalan minority activists in Spain,” they said in a statement.  Top leaders arrested  Following the October 2017 independence referendum, Spain arrested leaders of the Catalonian independence movement on charges of sedition.   The alleged… Read More

Against the backdrop of the ongoing and deadly Russian invasion of Ukraine, the experts urged the IOC to adopt a decision in that direction, and to go further.  Level playing field needed  Alexandra Xanthaki, Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights and Ashwini K.P., Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, asked the… Read More

Mr. Trukhanov spoke to UN News shortly after the decision was announced, on Wednesday, and explained the laborious process that led to the inclusion. Odesa Mayor, Gennady Trukhanov Gennady Trukhanov We applied for inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage List back in 2009 and were accepted into the provisional list. But the procedure dragged on and, with the onset of the… Read More

In his speech, delivered at UN Headquarters in New York, Mr. Guterres recalled that, within months, the Nazis had dismantled fundamental constitutional rights and paved the way for totalitarian rule: members of parliament were arrested, freedom of the press was abolished, and the first concentration camp was built, in Dachau. The antisemitism of the Nazis became government policy, followed by… Read More

Maria Hurtado said in a statement that the judgement was just the latest “in a series of actions against civil society”, journalists, other media and opposition groups and human rights defenders. MHG was founded in 1976 by well-known dissidents and reported on human rights violations in the former Soviet Union (USSR) and later the Russian Federation, she noted. It’s named… Read More