How do you overcome years of sexual slavery, despite scars which will always remain?
Grizelda Grootboom knows the answer, and in September, she joined the Secretary-General at the UN’s main podium, to tell her story.
She came to urge the General Assembly to adopt a Political Declaration to end the scourge of human trafficking, telling delegates that they had to put victims’ needs first.
South Sudan has known no respite since fighting broke out last July, following the collapse of a peace deal between the government and opposition forces.
People in Africa’s newest nation have witnessed "barbaric" acts of violence carried out by armed groups, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), such as the sexual assault of women and girls and the kidnapping of boys for forced drafting.
The number of South Sudan refugees in Uganda has now passed the one million mark.
A charity runner who does not particularly enjoy running has completed 40 marathons in 40 days to raise awareness about the global goal of providing all people with clean water and sanitation by 2030.
Mina Guli’s quest spanned six continents where she ran along the banks of six of the world’s major rivers, including the Amazon and the Nile.
Sylvia Earle, perhaps the world’s best known woman marine scientist, literally fell head over heels in love with the ocean as a little girl.
“I got knocked over by a wave on the New Jersey Shore when I was three-years-old and the ocean got my attention,” says the veteran oceanographer, who has also earned the sobriquet “Her Deepness.”
An Indian man who cycled across eight countries to be reunited with his sweetheart in Sweden has shared his story at the United Nations.
Pradyumna Kumar Mahanandia, known as PK, made the incredible journey in the mid-1970s.
He and his wife Charlotte Von Schedvin, known as Lotta, have been together ever since.
Their story is told in the book ‘The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love’ by Swedish journalist and travel writer, Per J. Andersson.
During the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, “rape was as much a tool of genocide as the machete,” the UN special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, Zainab Bangura has said.
Women from the ethnic minority Tutsi group in the African country were “systematically targeted and raped” during that period, investigations by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda or ICTR uncovered.
Listen to a special holiday season programme: a look back at the best of our new podcast series launched in 2016, The Lid is On. It’s the phrase you hear at the close of business each day at UN Headquarters, when the meetings are over. We thought it was a distinctive name for our more relaxed, in-depth and conversational-based show that highlights some of the extraordinary personal stories that surface here at the UN. Matthew Wells highlights three of our favourite interviews from the series.
Duration: 10'00
The “virulent spread” of violent extremism is posing a “direct assault” on the UN Charter and human rights around the world according to the UN, led by a new generation of young terrorists.
In the latest edition of our podcast The Lid Is On, we’ve been talking in-depth to a former supporter of the Taliban extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mubin Shaikh, about how the UN and Member States can turn the terrorist tide.
Ending AIDS means controlling the spread of spread of HIV and lessening the impact on people’s lives, says the UN agency fighting the epidemic, UNAIDS.
It says the number of people on anti-retroviral treatment today has surpassed the amount of new infections each year.
In our latest podcast, you’ll hear from fervent advocates who are battling HIV and AIDS, like fashion designer Kenneth Cole, singer and songwriter Annie Lennox and the charismatic Loyce Maturu, a young girl living with HIV.
Two United Nations policemen have been talking about the “horror stories” they heard from the families of victims of an indicted war criminal from the former Yugoslavia.
The two policemen, Vladimir Dzuro from the Czech Republic and Kevin Curtis from the United Kingdom, made history in 1997 when they delivered the very first alleged war criminal to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague.
