Yemen has condemned the international community’s silence on Saudi Arabia’s ongoing aggression and blockade, saying it emboldens Riyadh to continue its atrocities.
The Yemeni Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in a statement released on Saturday, said the Saudi military continues to target ordinary people and civilian infrastructure, as it has done over the past years.
The ministry denounced Saudi strikes on civilians and non-military installations as a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I of 1977.
In the latest attack, a series of Saudi airstrikes targeted a residential neighborhood in the Maqbanah district of Yemen’s southwestern Ta’izz province, killing nine civilians, including a woman and a girl, and injuring 16 others.
The statement also censured the deafening silence of the international community, which claims to uphold human rights while lecturing others about them.
It noted that such an approach would offer Saudi officials the carte blanche to keep on their brutalities, and would make the international community complicit in Riyadh’s crimes and aggression.
The Yemeni foreign ministry then called on the international community, particularly the UN Security Council, the Human Rights Council, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as human rights organizations, to abandon double standards, condemn the heinous crimes committed against Yemeni people, and pressure Saudi Arabia to honor its obligations under international humanitarian law.
The ministry finally emphasized that Saudi atrocities would not go unpunished, and that the House of Saud, “whose hands are stained with blood and whose fingers with guilt,” would be held accountable.
On July 20, the Sana’a government announced a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabia in response to “an unjust and oppressive siege” on Yemen for almost 12 years.
Subsequently, the Yemeni armed forces have reported a series of successful missions that have targeted vessels associated with Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its allies imposed a blockade on Yemen, initiating a comprehensive military offensive that received support in terms of military, political, and logistical assistance from the United States and several Western countries.
Tens of thousands of Yemenis have lost their lives; however, Saudi Arabia has failed to achieve its primary goal of reestablishing a puppet government that served its interests.
The UN should resist pressure from Kiev’s Western backers and finally address the issue of widespread abuse of captured Russian servicemen in Ukrainian secret prisons, Russian Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik has said.
During a conversation with the chairman of the UN Committee Against Torture Claude Heller on Thursday, Miroshnik said that Moscow is aware of a whole network of such detention facilities, operating in Ukraine’s Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, and Sumy Regions as well as in the country’s capital, Kiev.
The Russian servicemen are “going through hell” in so-called “transit prisons,” which are set up at deployment points of Ukrainian military units and nationalist battalions, he said.
“The thugs, who hide their faces behind masks… and address each other only by their call signs, subject the captured Russian troops to inhuman abuse. Waterboarding, electrocuting, baiting with dogs and amputations performed without anesthesia are just a few examples of the techniques systematically employed by the Ukrainian tormentors,” the envoy, who is charged with documenting Kiev’s war crimes, stressed.
According to Miroshnik, captured troops are usually sent to those facilities in the early stages of their imprisonment, where they are held in cages, pits, and stone dungeons.
The Kiev government does not allow ombudsmen and human rights activists into those “torture chambers,” but the Russian authorities have gathered hundreds of accounts of survivors detailing what has been happening there, he said.
“This information had been passed on to the UN Secretariat on more than one occasion,” but no action followed, Miroshnik added.
By ignoring the existence of the secret prisons and systematic torture of Russian troops, the global body “encourages the spread of such criminal practices and disregard for the relevant UN Convention,” he added.
“Many experts are aware of this disgraceful phenomenon, yet there is a lack of political will to overcome the pressure from the foreign accomplices to the conflict, who shield the Kiev regime from accountability and prevent a thorough investigation of its conduct,” the envoy said.
While turning a blind eye to the torture of Russian troops, the UN published several reports accusing Russia of mistreating Ukrainian prisoners, based on accounts by POWs returned by Moscow to Kiev. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has labeled those accusations of abuse “disinformation.”
Last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the UN Secretariat was unable to properly perform its duties as most key positions are occupied by representatives of NATO countries.
The current team, led by [UN General-Secretary] Antonio Guterres, who is a Portuguese national, “promotes biased approaches and double standards, effectively serving the interests of a group of Western nations,” Lavrov insisted during a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Where heating is available, many cannot afford to adequately heat their homes. Only 32% of households reported being able to do so during the last heating season, a figure that dropped to just 1% in frontline regions.
Argentina’s delegation at the United Nations abstained from a resolution aimed at eradicating modern forms of colonialism, siding with the Trump administration and undercutting President Javier Milei’s recent demands over the British-occupied Malvinas Islands.
The vote took place in the Fourth Committee of the General Assembly. The measure, presented by the Russian Federation, sought to ratify and reinforce the goals of Resolution 1514, the landmark text approved in 1960 that declared colonialism incompatible with the UN Charter and fundamental human rights.
Argentina’s diplomatic delegation chose to stand aside rather than endorse the initiative. The move placed the Milei government in line with the position promoted by the White House, which pressed allied governments to abstain.
The resolution passed anyway. Delegates recorded 85 votes in favor, 49 against and 23 abstentions, sending the text to the full General Assembly for consideration.
The alignment extended beyond Buenos Aires and Washington. Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru and Paraguay joined the abstention, a bloc of right-leaning regional governments that followed the U.S. lead.
On the other side, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and India voted in favor. Their support reaffirmed the global backing for territorial integrity and decolonization processes, and set up a sharp divide within Latin America itself.
The Russian draft went further than the 1960 declaration. It extended the concept of colonialism to cover unilateral coercive measures and the economic and financial sanctions promoted by Washington around the world, a provision that made the vote a direct test of alignment.
The UN General Assembly’s Fourth Committee approved the draft resolution “Addressing contemporary forms of colonialism” by 85 votes in favour, 49 against, with 23 abstentions. Sponsored by Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Belarus, Palestine and others, it recognizes colonialism in… pic.twitter.com/MqgQfoMhME
The abstention collides with the rhetoric Milei has used on Malvinas, the archipelago occupied by Britain since 1833. His government has campaigned publicly for the defense of sovereignty and demanded sanctions against oil companies operating on that Argentine soil.
The contrast sharpened in September, when the Argentine President addressed the General Assembly. There he read extended passages demanding the eradication of colonialism and stated plainly that the principle of self-determination “exists to liberate colonized peoples, not to enshrine situations derived from colonization.”
Those words sit uneasily with the vote his own diplomats just cast, or chose not to cast. The abstention, in effect, withheld support from a document that echoes the very argument Milei delivered from the rostrum.
The domestic reaction was immediate. Carlos Bianco, the government minister for Buenos Aires province, called the abstention an irresponsible act against a historic national cause. “The Malvinas question deserves a diplomacy that does not kneel. Abstaining in the face of colonialism is not just an embarrassment, it constitutes an act of irresponsibility. The Malvinas question must once again be defined by Argentines. And it will be,” Bianco wrote on social media.
The episode exposes a tension running through the Milei administration’s foreign policy. It has embraced Washington as its principal ally while maintaining, at least in public speeches, a sovereignty claim that Washington’s abstention strategy directly undercuts.
Milei dice que quiere recuperar Malvinas. En la ONU, la Argentina se abstuvo de votar contra el colonialismo. Hace dos semanas, esa misma delegación decía que Malvinas es una situación colonial. Sobran las contradicciones. No tienen política exterior propia y desprecian al país… pic.twitter.com/I5cYaXCbvp
Text reads: “Milei says he wants to take back Malvinas. At the UN, Argentina abstained from voting against colonialism. Two weeks ago, that same delegation said that Malvinas are a colonial situation. The contradictions abound. They have no foreign policy of their own and despise the country they govern.”
Argentina’s historic position on Malvinas has long drawn broad support across Latin America and the developing world, precisely the coalition that voted in favor of the resolution Buenos Aires declined to endorse.
The measure now moves to the plenary, where the same fault lines are likely to reappear. What Argentina does there will reveal whether the abstention was an isolated calculation or a settled posture. For now, the vote leaves a record that is hard to reconcile: a government that speaks of liberating colonized peoples, yet declines to vote for a resolution doing exactly that.
Efforts to raise hundreds of billions of dollars to preserve the world's oceans, forests, rivers, lakes and other parts of the natural world have fallen short ahead of a key U.N. summit on biodiversity.
The UN says Colombia’s new rules could let police end dialogue prematurely and use force against demonstrators.
The United Nations warned Thursday that Colombia’s new rules governing protests could give police excessive discretion to use force, potentially putting peaceful demonstrators at risk.
Signed Tuesday by President Abelardo de la Espriella, the decree changes police procedures during demonstrations, allowing authorities to act against people committing violent acts without waiting for dialogue with protesters to conclude.
In a statement released Thursday, the UN Human Rights Office in Colombia raised concerns about the criteria for ending negotiations, the decree’s definition of violence and the circumstances under which authorities can intervene in road blockades.
Some provisions are open to broad interpretation, the office warned, potentially allowing authorities to end dialogue and resort to force.
The decree identifies several grounds for intervention, including carrying or using weapons, holding people against their will, assaulting others and destroying infrastructure. The UN acknowledged that these acts pose different risks to life and physical integrity but said they must be addressed separately.
Action against people committing violent acts should not automatically end dialogue with demonstrators who continue to protest peacefully, the office said.
It also stressed that force, including less-lethal weapons, must be used only as a last resort, after nonviolent means of restraint have been exhausted, in accordance with General Comment No. 37 on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella signed Decree 1525, a measure that facilitates police repression by broadening the definition of “violence” during popular protests.
Interior Minister Rodrigo Lara warned that the new regulation will take effect before demonstrations… pic.twitter.com/YYfouyRGyt
The office also criticized the decree’s definition of violence as broader than international standards, noting that it includes threats of aggression and conduct that does not necessarily cause injuries, deaths or serious property damage.
Authorities should distinguish between carrying an object that could be considered a weapon, threatening to use it and actually using it, the UN said. Possession alone does not make someone violent or change the peaceful nature of an assembly.
Road blockades do not automatically justify force
The UN warned that blocking a road does not, by itself, make a demonstration violent. It also called for a review of the decree’s reference to a “serious and imminent disruption,” saying the criterion could be used to justify breaking up peaceful protests.
The duration of a blockade, the importance of the road affected and the resulting economic losses should not, on their own, justify coercive action, the office said.
“Economic impact or disruption to the normal functioning of a productive activity should not, in themselves, constitute justification for the use of force,” it said.
The office acknowledged that some provisions could help protect the right to peaceful protest, particularly those distinguishing peaceful demonstrators from people committing violent acts. However, it insisted that protecting peaceful assemblies must remain the primary objective of any changes to protest regulations.
The UN office said it had consulted the Colombian government on the decree and that some of its proposed amendments were incorporated into the version signed Tuesday.
Legal expert says that Israel does more than anyone else to protect civilians, and that the manipulation of international law to vilify Israel is a threat to Western civilization
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A week after two cargo ships were struck by drones off the Bulgarian coast, the attack was repeated even closer to our territorial waters with a similar outcome: one vessel was sunk, and another was abandoned by its crew, resulting in injuries and likely numerous fatalities. This is already having tangible consequences for Bulgaria. “Attacks […]
Drawing on dozens of interviews with intelligence and police officers across two continents, a Guardian investigation reveals the murderous cost of our insatiable appetite for cocaine
As abductions go, few have been more brazen. Alan Jalloh was with two friends outside Goodies supermarket, frantic as usual with late afternoon shoppers. Rush hour in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, was under way with familiar gusto.
A black Toyota Rav4 forced its way through the Peninsula highway traffic. Witnesses describe burly white men leaping out, yanking on balaclavas. Jalloh, 40, seemed to freeze. As did his two friends, one a famous Freetown footballer. All three were dragged into the waiting SUV. None of them have been seen since.
Parts of London look like a dump. But that hasn't stopped the UN from giving Mayor Sadiq Khan an award for "improving urban life". It's all very incestuous, says Charlotte Gill: the UN is just rewarding its cronies.
The detailed report, “Gaza in Numbers: Three Years Since the War Began, One Year Since the Ceasefire”, is based on data from Gaza’s Ministry of Health, the United Nations and its agencies, the joint Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, and other international and human rights organizations.
Five years after seizing Kabul, the Taliban’s strongest argument for international acceptance rests on control. The Taliban governs every provincial capital and faces no conventional army capable of marching on Kabul. It repeatedly cites improved security as proof that Afghanistan’s post-2021 order is settled. But armed resistance is becoming more geographically dispersed, more organizationally diverse […]
There are careers that end in triumph, careers that end in scandal, and careers that achieve the rarer distinction of staging their own final indictment. António Guterres has found his in Islamabad.
After nearly a decade as Secretary-General of the United Nations, he arrives in Pakistan in the twilight of his tenure and performs the ritual that has come to define him: smile warmly, praise generously, deplore abstractly, and avoid saying anything that might seriously inconvenience the powerful men standing beside him. His record is littered with eloquent concern, grave warnings and solemn appeals. What it has lacked, again and again, is the one quality that gives moral language meaning: courage when courage carries a cost.
In Islamabad, the performance is almost indecent. Guterres praises Pakistan as a source of “solidarity and solutions,” commends the “resilience” of its people, and assures them that the United Nations stands with them. Meanwhile, former prime minister Imran Khan remains imprisoned after the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared his detention arbitrary.
UN experts have raised concerns about his treatment, prolonged isolation and conditions of confinement; the UN Committee Against Torture has separately highlighted broader allegations of politically motivated detention, torture, intimidation and repression.
Guterres does not need opposition politicians or troublesome journalists to brief him. He could simply read his own institution’s reports. But that would ruin the choreography.
So the Secretary-General moves through meetings with Pakistan’s political and security establishment while one of the country’s most popular and persecuted political leaders sits behind bars. Outside the diplomatic bubble, Khan’s supporters confront barricades, arrests and the familiar machinery of coercion. The Pakistani state, chronically incompetent at governing, once again discovers astonishing administrative efficiency when citizens decide to protest.
And Guterres praises their resilience. The euphemism is almost grotesque. A population is subjected to repression, institutional decay and coercive politics, and the world’s senior international diplomat congratulates it for enduring the experience. It is the diplomatic equivalent of praising a prisoner’s fortitude while refusing to ask who locked the cell.
But Islamabad is not a lapse in the Guterres record. It is the culmination of it.
The same moral evasion has defined his response to Gaza. For years, Guterres has described the catastrophe in increasingly apocalyptic terms: mass death, starvation, displacement, destroyed hospitals, shattered families, collective punishment and violations of international law. He has rarely lacked adjectives for horror.
What he lacked was willingness to name its most consequential possibility. Genocide.
When confronted directly, Guterres retreated into procedure, insisting that such a determination belonged to the courts. It was bureaucratic cowardice dressed as juridical sobriety. Apparently, a Secretary-General may describe the destruction of a people in exhaustive detail, denounce their starvation, mourn their children and warn of their dehumanization — but the moment the facts threaten to crystallize into the politically dangerous word, he develops an almost priestly devotion to institutional restraint.
The absurdity became complete when UN experts explicitly warned of genocide and a UN Commission of Inquiry later concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The institution Guterres leads could say what Guterres himself repeatedly would not. This was not neutrality. It was evasion refined into method.
That is the essence of the Guterres tenure: moral vocabulary without moral escalation. He has perfected the art of sounding anguished while remaining politically non-threatening. His speeches travel bravely to the edge of the necessary conclusion, stare into the abyss, invoke international law, then retreat into another carefully worded appeal to governments that have already demonstrated their contempt for it.
Gaza became a theatre of catastrophic adjectives without commensurate political naming. Pakistan now becomes a festival of diplomatic compliments beside a prison cell.
The parallel is devastating. In Gaza, the UN system could document devastation while its Secretary-General recoiled from the word that carried the greatest political charge. In Pakistan, UN mechanisms can document arbitrary detention, abuse and repression while their chief shakes hands with the authorities presiding over the system they have condemned.
That is not merely institutional contradiction. It is leadership failure.
No serious person expects a UN Secretary-General to command armies, free prisoners by decree or compel governments into decency. But the office possesses one form of power that cannot be dismissed so easily: moral authority. Guterres has spent much of his tenure conserving it so carefully that, when history demanded its expenditure, there was often nothing to show for it.
He has confused caution with wisdom and diplomatic acceptability with statesmanship. But statesmanship is not the art of saying only what power can comfortably tolerate. Its purpose, at decisive moments, is precisely the opposite.
And so Islamabad is a fitting final tableau: Guterres praising resilience while surrounded by evidence of why resilience is necessary; representing institutions whose own findings he seems unwilling to embody; smiling through repression in Pakistan after years of speaking around genocide in Gaza.
History will not care how many statements he issued, how solemnly he frowned, or how often he invoked international law.
It will ask what he said when speaking plainly became dangerous. Too often, António Guterres chose not to. He saw almost everything. He described almost everything. And when history demanded courage rather than description, he chose cowardice.
How Europe and the U.S. cynically turned Africa into a “cage without bars.” In 1960, remembered in history as the Year of Africa, 17 countries on the continent gained long-awaited political independence. It seemed that the nearly 500-year era of Western European empires had sunk into oblivion. But if you look closely at socioeconomic indicators, […]
Wars, sanctions and shrinking civic space shape the opening of the General Assembly’s Third Committee The United Nations General Assembly’s principal human-rights committee opened its annual debate with warnings that war, racism, inequality and restrictions on civil society are weakening protections worldwide. Yet the discussion also exposed a deeper political divide: governments agree that the […]
(Bloomberg) — Turkey and the United Nations have set up fresh talks in Russia and Ukraine to discuss a Black Sea ceasefire, trying to coalesce scattered efforts to protect grain...
Iran has warned the United Nations that US President Donald Trump’s threats to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic constitute a grave development, particularly because the remarks were made from the podium of the UN General Assembly.
Gholamhossein Darzi, Iran’s ambassador and chargé d’affaires to the UN in New York, raised the issue in a September 27 letter addressed to UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the President of the Security Council, Jérôme Bonnafont.
Darzi’s letter came in response to Trump’s September 22 address to the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, during which the US president said he could “annihilate the Islamic Republic” if no agreement was reached with Tehran. The wording appears in the official UN transcript of Trump’s speech.
Iran says threats made at UN carry wider implications
Darzi said Trump’s remarks were neither isolated nor ambiguous, arguing that they form part of a continuing pattern of public threats against Iran by the president of a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
“These repulsive statements are not ambiguous remarks or isolated utterances. They are rather part of a sustained pattern of public threats against Iran by the head of a permanent member state of the Security Council,” Darzi wrote.
“This latest development is particularly grave and alarming because the United Nations General Assembly is not a venue for threats of annihilation,” he added.
The Iranian envoy stressed that the General Assembly serves as the UN’s principal universal forum and was established to promote international peace, cooperation, and relations among states.
In the letter, Darzi referred to several previous statements by Trump that he said demonstrated a broader pattern of threats against Iran.
He cited remarks on March 22 in which Trump threatened to “hit and obliterate” Iranian power plants, followed by statements on March 30 threatening destruction of Iran’s energy facilities and other vital infrastructure, including desalination facilities.
Iran calls for UN response to threats
Darzi argued that the issue extends beyond political rhetoric, saying an explicit threat against a sovereign UN member state raises questions concerning the UN Charter, international peace and security, and the prohibition on the threat or use of force.
He further linked the latest remarks to ongoing US-Israeli aggression against its sovereignty and territorial integrity since February 28, as well as attacks that targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.
“The issue before the Organization is therefore not merely one of political rhetoric,” Darzi wrote, arguing that failure by the international community to respond could normalize threats against entire nations and undermine the authority of the UN Charter.
The UN has itself emphasized the need for restraint and adherence to international law during the current high-level week. In his September 22 opening address, Secretary-General António Guterres said the principle that force cannot determine whose lives and rights matter was under “profound strain” and called on world leaders to use the week for de-escalation and dialogue.
Iran reiterates right to self-defense
Darzi said Iran would continue to defend itself against any further aggression and reserved its “full and unimpeachable right to self-defense.”
He also said Tehran reserves the right to pursue legal avenues to seek accountability from states and individuals it holds responsible for losses and damage inflicted on the Iranian people.
“Regardless of whether these threats are merely delusional fantasies, they will, as in the past, never materialize or be put into action in the face of the resolute resistance and determined defense of the Iranian people and armed forces,” Darzi wrote.
The Iranian envoy requested that his letter be circulated as an official document of the UN Security Council.
Climate Week NYC is packing its tent after another week of green grandstanding, empty promises and soaring energy bills, says Dr Tilak Doshi. Same circus, same clowns, same time next year.
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