The news about the United States spying on United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and his deputy, Amina Mohammed, revealed dissatisfaction in leaked US intelligence documents over Guterres’s perceived lack of toughness regarding the Russians and their invasion of Ukraine in 2022. One would expect the Russians, undoubtedly also spying on Guterres, to have different views, annoyed by…
Part 2 of our talk with Ipsita Chatterjee, a human geographer interested in the economic, cultural, and geopolitical impacts of globalization. Ipsita is also a prolific author, and her latest book “The Alt-Right Movement: Dissecting Racism, Patriarchy, and Anti-immigrant Xenophobia” served as the basis of our discussion. To help me better understand this phenomenon, she took…
War undermines the lives, health, and safety of all human beings, but for approximately 2.7 million persons with disabilities and their families living in Ukraine, the situation is much worse. Although accurate statistics are hard to come by, many Ukrainians with a disability, especially those with the most severe conditions, have not been able to…
This month, millions of people around the world will be observing Pride month, celebrating the LGBTQ+ community and the progress that has been made towards equality and equal rights in recent years. However, as more people start to observe this celebration and more companies rush to put a rainbow into their logos, it’s important to…
Many times, over my long career with the United Nations system, I quoted these lyrics from the Doobie Brothers song, ‘Takin’ It to the Streets,’ to explain the meaning of human rights. These lyrics paraphrase in clear and simple terms the principles embodied in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which we…
As if the Qatar 2022 World Cup had not generated enough controversy already, another dispute came to stir things up. FIFA announced on 25 February that it will not compensate UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, for losses that its members may incur due to a possible holding of the World Cup in November-December 2022.
