Peace and Disarmament

“It is in the interest of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any circumstances.” This is the view of the 155 states that endorsed the joint statement delivered by Ambassador Dell Higgie of…

Global financial institutions made an estimated 402 billion US dollars available to nuclear weapons producers. The report Don’t Bank on the Bomb, published on the 7th of November by Dutch peace organization PAX, identifies 411 banks, insurance companies and pension…

The Nobel Peace Laureates have relocated their 2014 summit from South Africa to Italy after abandoning any possibility of attaining a visa for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The summit was due to take place in Cape Town in October…

UN General Assembly takes forward proposals from the UN Open Ended Working Group and reaffirms its decision to hold a High Level Conference on Nuclear Abolition During the month of October the United Nations General Assembly considered a number of…

 Human Wrongs Watch A Syrian singer’s songbook, a Turkmen calligrapher’s ink, a Palestinian Iraqi’s lucky lighter, a Yazidi teenager’s Taylor Swift album. These are a civil war’s survivors and the things they carried.’  By Lauren Bohn*, November 2014 — The…

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visited the former Berlin Wall border crossing point Checkpoint Charlie, November 7, 2014. At one of functions marking this commemorative day he remarked that tensions between the major powers have pushed the world closer to…

The US government signalled its intention to participate in the forthcoming Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in early December. The conference is the third in a series of such conferences that started in early 2013 in…

The Syrian conflict is taking yet another dramatic turn as the militant jihadists of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate, rout rebels from their strongholds in Idlib, threatening to eliminate entirely any presence by moderate rebels in northern Syria, as…

Armistice Day, November 11. Bright red poppies have appeared in their thousands to adorn the spaces around the Tower of London. The symbolism evokes the image of poppies springing up from destruction and decay in Belgium’s Flanders Fields, sites of…

  Human Wrongs Watch The war in Syria must be “frozen locally” on the ground so that the growing threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) may be fully confronted, a United Nations envoy on…