INSIDE VIEW
Patricia Espinosa is the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) since 2016. Before joining the UNFCCC, Espinosa was Diplomat for Mexico and former Secretary of Foreign Affairs. You took over the leadership of the...
1 June marks the Global Day of Parents. On this occasion, we have dedicated the fourth episode of our Parents’ Voices series to the situation of non-staff categories at the UN. Often called the UN’s “forgotten workforce,” consultants and individual contractors receive...
Launched in February 2022 ahead of the 49th session of the Human Rights Council (HRC), the Mandate Review and Management System (MRMS) quietly accomplished the single most important process mapping and rationalization since the creation of the HRC in 2006. The MRMS...
You have a long experience addressing ‘food crises’ in the field. Can you tell us more about your work and how crucial it is to address those crises? I have worked on food crisis contexts for over 25 years. The more I work in this field, the more I realise how much...
It must be understood that disciplinary matters for the United Nations, whilst having some similarities with discipline within national civil services, differ in respect of the inclusion of matters which may be regarded as criminal within a Member State and would be...
I am conducting single-subject research. Historically, examples of self-experimentation occur more often than one realizes. I note, however, that self-experimentation is also a common trait of comic book mad scientists. That is perhaps the subject of another article....
I had not planned to follow in James Baldwin’s footsteps over Easter. Neither had I planned to follow Teju Cole’s or Nativ’s path. But here I was walking amongst the weathered but resilient traditional houses of this spa village of Leukerbad in Switzerland looking for...
Tell us about yourself My UN career journey has seen me travel from freelance status based in Rome, working mostly for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and for European institutions in Brussels, through to appointment as a staff interpreter at United...
I thought I had always understood inequity. After all, I am an African-American woman raised in the United States. Racial slurs were hurled at me as early as age five, both by white children and other African-Americans. Their unwanted comments about my hair, skin and...
INSIDE VIEW
I had not planned to follow in James Baldwin’s footsteps over Easter. Neither had I planned to follow Teju Cole’s or Nativ’s path. But here I was walking amongst the weathered but resilient traditional houses of this spa village of Leukerbad in Switzerland looking for...
Tell us about yourself My UN career journey has seen me travel from freelance status based in Rome, working mostly for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and for European institutions in Brussels, through to appointment as a staff interpreter at United...
I thought I had always understood inequity. After all, I am an African-American woman raised in the United States. Racial slurs were hurled at me as early as age five, both by white children and other African-Americans. Their unwanted comments about my hair, skin and...
One aspect of professional development is ‘continuous learning’. Many corporate entities see this as a great way of increasing their value proposition by encouraging their employees to pay attention to it. Beyond just encouraging people to undertake it, some corporate...
2020 saw an unprecedented pandemic and global outcry for racial equality. It reminded us of the health inequalities worldwide, that racial injustice is still quite prevalent in society, and that there remains much collective work to do to advance global racial equity...
"Now is the time to choose the rocky road instead of the paved path. You may have to move many obstacles on your journey to success, but when you arrive you will be much stronger for the effort.” Ban Ki-moon My human rights journey began years before I had the words...
En sanglots, la tête posée sur mon bureau installé sous une tente en plein désert, un demandeur d’asile me raconte avoir perdu toute sa famille pendant la guerre civile qui a ravagé son pays. Joseph a été tellement traumatisé par les violences qu’il a subies durant la...
Daniel Johnson and Solange Behoteguy-Cortes, Producer and Commentator of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, are the team behind a successful series that has now reached its 50th podcast. How did you come up with the concept for this podcast? Daniel:...
The UN Secretariat, which has been operating now for more than 76 years, employs a large workforce scattered across the globe. Its headquarters is based in New York City and several “offices away from Headquarters (OAH’s) located in Geneva, Vienna, Bangkok, Santiago...
The political scientist Thomas Weiss critically asked in his 2018 book: “Would the world be better without the UN?” While the attempt at posing a counterfactual question looks good, in reality it does not really matter how one would answer the question. The truth is...
