GENEVA: UN human rights chief Volker Turk appealed for $400 million on Thursday to address mounting human rights needs in countries such as Sudan and Myanmar, after donor funding cuts drastically reduced the work of his office and left it in \u201csurvival mode.\u201d<\/p>\n
The UN office is appealing for $100 million less than last year, after a significant scale back of its work in some areas due to a fall in contributions from countries including the US and Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are currently \u200cin survival \u200cmode, delivering under strain,\u201d Turk told \u200cdelegates \u2060in a \u200cspeech in Geneva, urging countries to step up support.<\/p>\n
In the last year, Turk\u2019s office raised alarm about human rights violations in Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, and Myanmar, among others.<\/p>\n
However, due to slashes in funding, Turk\u2019s office undertook less than half the number of \u2060human rights monitoring missions compared to 2024, and reduced its presence in \u200c17 countries, he said. Last year it \u200dreceived $90 million less in \u200dfunding than it needed, which resulted in 300 job \u200dcuts, directly impacting the office\u2019s work, Turk said in December.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot afford a human rights system in crisis,\u201d he stated.<\/p>\n
Turk listed examples of the impacts of cuts, noting the Myanmar program was cut by more than 60 percent in the last year, limiting its ability to gather evidence.<\/p>\n
A \u2060UN probe into possible war crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is also struggling to become fully operational due to limited funding, while work to prevent gender-based violence and protect the rights of LGBTIQ+ people globally has been cut up to 75 percent, the office said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis means more hate speech and attacks, and fewer laws to stop them,\u201d Turk stated.<\/p>\n
The UN human rights office is responsible for investigating rights violations. Its work contributes to \u200cUN Security Council deliberations and is widely used by international courts, according to the office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GENEVA: UN human rights chief Volker Turk appealed for $400 million on Thursday to address mounting human rights needs in countries such as Sudan and Myanmar, after donor funding cuts drastically reduced the work of his office and left it in \u201csurvival mode.\u201d The UN office is appealing for $100 million less than last year, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":93276,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93277,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93258\/revisions\/93277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}