UN-aligned calls on the OHCHR to take action to ban harmful conversion practices against LGBTQ+

The Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Belarus, Anaïs Marin, issued her annual report on June 29, which paints a dire picture of tightening legislation and diminishing civil and political rights.

After the Soviet Union invaded Finland, the League of Nations kicked the country from its council. Why doesn't the UN do that too? Well, for all sorts of reasons, but mainly because it is bound to the moral low ground.

Appeasement is giving the school bully your lunch money in order to avoid being beaten up. In politics, however, it is more like giving the school bully someone else’s lunch money, to stop them from being picked on.

Tedros Ghebreyesus gets re-elected by the World Health Assembly (WHA) to a second term despite his affiliation with the repressive regime that has been accused of torture, repression, and electoral fraud.

Sadly, “concerns” is one of the strongest words in the United Nations’ arsenal, only a notch or two below “unacceptable”- its primary weapon – which, to no one’s surprise, was not used during this visit.

In this article, we will explore the three UN conventions that are designed to protect the laws of our seas: the UNCLOS, the ITLOS  and ISA.

As long as international justice is left in the hands of nation states at the UN nothing will ever improve because self-interest will always win the day. This needs to change.

Guterres visit to Kiev made it once again clear: the UN is not led by principles, but by States that regularly flout the most basic standards of decency.

Putin, sometimes the West is as crazy as you are, but not for saying you should be removed, but for trying to mitigate the blow.

Once again, the UN fails to secure its primary mission of safeguarding world peace. But what can we do about it?

Would you entrust a child you love to the care of a school or nursery if you knew that not only many of its teachers, but the school board itself, consisted of child abusers, rapists and murderers? Of course not! And yet that is exactly what we are doing when we entrust world peace and human rights to the United Nations.

Many may not know, but the United Nations is the creator of some of the worst “reality TV” of all time. This is The Gordian Magazine’s review of United Nations events as if they were reality TV.

Apart from the hackneyed pleas to resolve the differences and a blunt reassertion of the facts there were no enlightened solutions aimed at finding ways of de-escalating the Ukraine crisis.

Participating members in this UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine attempt their best with this bland, shallow and awkwardly structured meeting, which can be characterised in 6 words: “Too late”, “nothing new” and “bad directing”.

Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions are three fundamental facets of any progressive civil society in the 21st century. Therefore, as the UN is in many senses the world’s guardian, one of its utmost duties is to promote, instil and maintain these components globally to ensure collective harmony.

Poverty, to put it simply, is one of humankind’s greatest ills and despite various ways to quantify, analyse or measure it, the problem remains unsolved. With the world finding itself in unprecedented straits owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has not only claimed the lives of 4,000,000, but has revealed ominous and record-breaking poverty worldwide, humanity more than ever needs its leaders to come together and work towards effective solutions.

The Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published on August 9, 2021. The Report paints a grim picture of the planet’s health owing to human induced climate change and rising temperatures.

On July 29, the UN had a Security Council Arria-Formula meeting on the deteriorating situation in Myanmar. US ambassador and senior advisor for political affairs, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, summarised the dire situation, stating: “Humanitarian aid workers inside Burma are sounding the alarm.

Climate change is the world’s biggest collective enemy, which threatens to destroy the very planet that we all live on. Whether it be rising sea levels, global warming, record-breaking temperatures, melting ice caps or an overall shift in severity of natural disasters, we as humankind need to strategise together for immediate solutions.