The relationship between the United States government and the United Nations machinery of human rights reporting has been a troubled one. Over the years, numerous UN rights monitors – called rapporteurs — have often been unwelcome visitors, sometimes refused permission to visit institutions like prisons or courts in some American states. The reception got a [...]
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The first of the eight Millennium Development Goals makes an ambitious demand: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger worldwide. It is now widely accepted that progress has been made in many countries on cutting the percentage of people living with less than the rock-bottom $1.25 a day. But decreasing hunger by half is another sadder story. [...]
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In early March, a report from Unicef and the World Health Organization proclaimed proudly that the world had not only met but also surpassed the Millennium Development Goals target of reducing by half the number of people without access to safe drinking water. The agencies said that 89 percent of the global population — that’s [...]
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Almost two decades have passed since a groundbreaking global conference on population and development in Cairo declared that women had the right, alone or with a partner, to make decisions about the number of children they wanted. Nearly 20 years is long enough for a 14-year-old girl – in a rural Ethiopian village, a vast [...]
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