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Fin août 2025, la Croatie a détruit des cargaisons de fruits albanais contaminés. L'épisode révèle les failles du secteur agricole albanais et, alors que Tirana vise l'UE, l'urgence de réformes en profondeur.

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Displaced people from Jabalia, Gaza, live in a destroyed building in downtown Gaza City. Demand action to end escalating Israeli crimes against Palestinians. Credit: UN News

By Human Rights Watch
NEW YORK, Sep 19 2025 (IPS)

World leaders gathering at the United Nations General Assembly from September 22-30, 2025, should commit to protecting the UN from powerful governments seeking to defund and undermine the organization’s capacity to promote human rights and international justice, Human Rights Watch said today.

On the eve of the General Assembly’s annual general debate, world leaders will hold a summit on the situation in Palestine, which French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are expected to preside over.

“Human rights and the UN itself are in the crosshairs of powerful governments to an unprecedented extent,” said Federico Borello, interim executive director of Human Rights Watch. “World leaders should pledge action to ensure the world body has the resources and political support it needs to carry out its lifesaving human rights and humanitarian work around the world – in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti, and elsewhere people are in need.”

Governments should also take action to stop Israel’s escalating atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Human Rights Watch said. They should condemn and take steps to counter US sanctions against International Criminal Court (ICC) officials, prominent Palestinian organizations, and a UN expert.

They should rally behind institutions like the ICC, which is combating impunity for war crimes and other atrocities in Myanmar, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the globe.

World leaders should use the September 22 Palestine conference to publicly commit to action aimed at ending decades of impunity for Israeli authorities’ violations of international humanitarian and human rights law against Palestinians. This summit, a response to the landmark July 2024 advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territory, is a continuation of a high-level meeting in July.

That ICJ advisory opinion determined that Israel’s decades-long occupation is unlawful, breaches Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and is marked by serious abuses, including apartheid. At the September 22 conference, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and others have said they would recognize a Palestinian state.

However, those declarations risk being empty gestures unless states commit to concrete actions to stop Israel’s extermination of Palestinians and expansion of unlawful settlements.

Governments should suspend arms transfers to Israel, ban trade with illegal settlements, and impose targeted sanctions on Israeli officials responsible for ongoing crimes against Palestinians, including crimes against humanity and acts of genocide, Human Rights Watch said. States should also press Hamas and Palestinian armed groups to release all civilian hostages.

The UN is in the throes of an existential financial crisis, largely due to the United States’ refusal to pay its assessed contributions – which countries are obligated to pay – and its cancellation of virtually all US voluntary funding for myriad UN agencies and bodies.

This is undermining UN humanitarian work, as well as human rights investigations in Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Myanmar, North Korea, and elsewhere.

The US is not alone in defaulting on its financial obligations to the UN. China, the UN’s second biggest contributor, has been delaying its payments to the organization’s regular budget and peacekeeping operations. Many other governments are also in arrears.

Wealthy governments in the European Union, UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and others have followed the US decision to gut its foreign aid programs by further reducing their own foreign aid budgets, exacerbating the UN’s financial troubles.

Governments that care about human rights should pay their assessed contributions in full and on time and increase voluntary contributions to the UN, prioritizing programs that protect human rights and save lives.

In 2023, the US contributed nearly $13 billion in assessed and voluntary contributions to the UN. That figure has dropped to nearly zero this year after Trump ordered a “review” of US contributions to the UN. It remains unclear if, when, and to what extent the US might resume UN funding.

The UN leadership should seek ways to reduce costs while avoiding across-the-board cuts that would disproportionately impact human rights work, which is already chronically underfunded. As the UN leadership presses ahead with a package of cost-cutting proposals as part of its “UN80” initiative, it should ensure that independent investigations of human rights abuses have the necessary resources to continue.

“UN monitoring and investigations can deter abusive governments from committing atrocities against civilians,” said Borello. “Powerful governments seeking to undermine the UN’s human rights and humanitarian programs should be condemned, not emulated. The lives of millions of people around the world depend on it.”

Leaders should press for meaningful action to address dire crises in Sudan and Haiti. In Sudan, civilians are facing famine, sexual violence, and other atrocities. In Haiti, criminal groups are expanding their control, escalating killings and sexual violence, including gang rape, forcing millions into displacement and facing acute food insecurity.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has declined to endorse calls from human rights defenders and member states to deploy physical protection missions to Sudan and Haiti.

On February 6, Trump issued an executive order that authorizes asset freezes and entry bans on ICC officials and others supporting the court’s work. The US government has so far imposed sanctions on the court’s prosecutor, his two deputies, six judges, the UN special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territory Francesca Albanese, as well as three leading Palestinian civil society organizations.

These sanctions are a blatant attack on the rule of law and the international justice system. They aim primarily to thwart the ICC’s ongoing Palestine investigation, including the court’s pending arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.

UN member states should affirm their support for the ICC’s global mandate and civil society’s critical work, and call on the US government to cancel the sanctions program. Member states should also commit to concrete steps to protect the court from these sanctions, including through legislation like the EU Blocking Statute, which aims to shield European companies from the effects of extraterritorial sanctions.

Member states should further commit to international justice by implementing all of the ICJ’s advisory opinions, including the court’s July opinion calling climate change an existential threat to the planet and arguing that states’ failure to protect the climate triggers legal consequences.

Delegates should urge member states to press ahead with negotiations on an international treaty to prevent and punish crimes against humanity. The treaty will fill a gap in international law that contributes to impunity for egregious acts of murder, torture, enforced disappearance, sexual violence, and persecution, among others, inflicted on civilians around the world.

Horrific, systematic abuses the Taliban have continued committing against women and girls in Afghanistan since retaking power in 2021 exemplify why gender apartheid as a crime against humanity should be included in any eventual treaty on crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said.

“The UN and international human rights system are being put to the test,” said Borello. “To be on the right side of history, it’s crucial to push back against powerful governments trying to undermine international norms and demolish avenues for accountability.”

https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/17/un-world-leaders-should-commit-to-human-rights-international-justice
https://www.hrw.org/topic/united-nations
https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/north-africa/israel/palestine

IPS UN Bureau

 

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The European Union operates largely in accordance with the principles of consensus democracy – that is, it seeks to integrate as many parties spanning the political spec­trum of its member states as possible. Amid the recent growth of far-right parties at both the national and European level, this approach has led to the increased participation of such forces in EU institutions. Analysis of key actors at the EU level shows that since no later than the 2024 European elections, representatives of far-right par­ties have been involved in all major EU decisions. The centres of their influence are the European Council and the Council of the EU, where they participate as leaders or partners in national governments. But they are increasingly becoming more influential in the European Parliament, which has shifted to the right and where alternative majorities are now possible. At the same time, significant differences remain between the far-right parties. Ultimately, the extent of their influence and which far-right trend predominates within the EU system depends mainly on the largest force in European politics – the European People’s Party.

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Amidst different global food insecurity challenges, like the COVID-19 pandemic and economic turmoil, this article investigates the potential of machine learning (ML) to enhance food insecurity forecasting. So far, only few existing studies have used pre-shock training data to predict food insecurity and if they did, they have neither done this at the household-level nor systematically tested the performance and robustness of ML algorithms during the shock phase. To address this research gap, we use pre-COVID trained models to predict household-level food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda and propose a new approach to evaluate the performance and robustness of ML models. The objective of this study is therefore to find high-performance and robust ML algorithms during a shock period, which is both methodologically innovative and practically relevant for food insecurity research. First, we find that ML can work well in a shock context when only pre-shock food security data are available. We can identify 80% of food-insecure households during the COVID-19 pandemic based on pre-shock trained models at the cost of falsely classifying around 40% of food-secure households as food insecure. Second, we show that the extreme gradient boosting algorithm, trained by balanced weighting, works best in terms of prediction quality. We also identify the most important predictors and find that demographic and asset features play a crucial role in predicting food insecurity. Last but not least, we also make a contribution by showing how different ML models should be evaluated in terms of their area under curve (AUC) value, the ability of the model to correctly classify positive and negative cases, and in terms of the change in AUC in different situations.

Amidst different global food insecurity challenges, like the COVID-19 pandemic and economic turmoil, this article investigates the potential of machine learning (ML) to enhance food insecurity forecasting. So far, only few existing studies have used pre-shock training data to predict food insecurity and if they did, they have neither done this at the household-level nor systematically tested the performance and robustness of ML algorithms during the shock phase. To address this research gap, we use pre-COVID trained models to predict household-level food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda and propose a new approach to evaluate the performance and robustness of ML models. The objective of this study is therefore to find high-performance and robust ML algorithms during a shock period, which is both methodologically innovative and practically relevant for food insecurity research. First, we find that ML can work well in a shock context when only pre-shock food security data are available. We can identify 80% of food-insecure households during the COVID-19 pandemic based on pre-shock trained models at the cost of falsely classifying around 40% of food-secure households as food insecure. Second, we show that the extreme gradient boosting algorithm, trained by balanced weighting, works best in terms of prediction quality. We also identify the most important predictors and find that demographic and asset features play a crucial role in predicting food insecurity. Last but not least, we also make a contribution by showing how different ML models should be evaluated in terms of their area under curve (AUC) value, the ability of the model to correctly classify positive and negative cases, and in terms of the change in AUC in different situations.