Israel's government announced on Monday it had severed all ties with the UN Human Rights Council and would prevent the council's fact-finding teams from entering Israel or the West Bank to investigate Jewish settlement construction.
Three generations of war have pushed waves of Afghan refugees beyond the borders of their homeland. Today three million Afghans live abroad, more than half of them having settled in Iran and Pakistan. The UN has a programme in Pakistan to help people return home. But fear of returning to a country at war, and of a precarious day-to-day life, means ever fewer refugees are making the move.
Former Libyan Prime Minister Baghdadi al-Mahmudi has lodged a claim for refugee status with the UNHCR, one of his lawyers said Friday. Earlier this week, his extradition to Libya had been sanctioned by a court in Tunisia, where he had sought refuge.
Libya ordered the UN refugee agency UNHCR to shut its office in the country on Tuesday. This comes a year after Italy and Libya agreed to intercept illegal migrants to Europe and return them to Libya, evoking criticism from rights groups.
French authorities battle with the question of what to do with the thousand or so migrants that loiter around the city of Calais at any given time. But should humanitarian concerns come frst?
The United Nations refugee agency says it is setting up an office in the northern French port of Calais to help the hundreds of migrants waiting to cross the Channel make an "informed decision" about passage to the United Kingdom.
More than two million people have fled fighting in northwest Pakistan since August 2008, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says, including 1.45 million displaced since a renewed Pakistani army offensive against the Taliban since May 2.
The UNHCR is flying in tonnes of emergency supplies to northwest Pakistan, where fighting between government troops and Taliban rebels has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
American UN official John Solecki, the local head of the UNHCR in Pakistan, was freed on Saturday. Solecki was kidnapped in the southern city of Quetta two months ago.
Pakistani officials have pledged to find the kidnappers of a top UN official abducted on Monday. But in the remote southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan, there are culprits aplenty.
