General Announcements - January 21, 2010
Joint UN Team to Assess Protection Issues in Haiti
A team of United Nations staff dealing with human rights and displacement arrived in Haiti over the weekend to assess a range of protection issues in the wake of the disaster that has left one third of the country’s nine million inhabitants in need of urgent assistance.
According to UN News reports, the five-member team comprises officials from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and represents the first time that the two Geneva-based bodies have fielded a joint protection team of this type during a crisis. Read full story
IPI Senior Vice President Edward C. Luck, in a podcast interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, said that though emergency recovery operations will move as rapidly as possible, "there will be difficulties" and efforts "may not move as quickly as one might want." Read full story and listen to podcast
UN spokesperson Martin Nesirky told journalists on Thursday that 61 UN personnel were killed in the January 12th earthquake, and 152 other UN personnel remain unaccounted for. Go to full story
Britain's The Independent ran a obituary of Hédi Annabi, who was nearing the end of a 30-year career in peacekeeping when in 2007 he was appointed to head MINUSTAH.
Related resources:
UN Channel on YouTube
DPKO Support Page for UN Staff in Haiti (Facebook)
Mark Turner's Blog (former FT journalist covering the UN)
The New York Times on Haiti
Ways to Contribute (NYT)
The Global Observatory
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Key Global Events to Watch in May
A list of key upcoming meetings and events with implications for global affairs.
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Recent Events
May 10, 2012
Arbour: What the Rule of Law Means
“In my understanding of the rule of law, fundamentally, what the rule of law means is that it embraces the principle of equality before the law,” Louise Arbour, president of the International Crisis Group (ICG), told an IPI audience on May 10, 2012. Ms. Arbour outlined that this means that no one is above the law and everyone has both equal protection and equal benefit of the law. 
May 03, 2012
Shachtman: Cyber Threats Akin to South Bronx, Not Pearl Harbor
“There’s not a danger of a cyber Pearl Harbor… it’s more like the South Bronx circa 1999, where there’s a danger that it becomes such a tough neighborhood that no one wants to set up shop there and people move out,” Noah Shachtman, editor of the Danger Room blog at Wired magazine and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, told an IPI audience at a panel on cyber security on May 3, 2011.
April 27, 2012
Preventing Conflicts in Africa: The Role of Early Warning and Response Systems
An April 27th roundtable discussion at IPI titled “Preventing Conflicts in Africa: The Role of Early Warning and Response Systems” examined the progress, prospects and challenges of regional and international early warning and response mechanisms to monitor, anticipate, and mitigate potential conflict situations in Africa.