Tread Softly

24/1/2022: US President Joe Biden entered the White House vowing to take a fair and human approach to immigration policy and reassert America's commitment to asylum seekers and refugees. A year later his record on the issues is deeply mixed.

Source: The New Humanitarian

21/1/2022: Eastern Africa continues to be the origin of most African refugees, with the region producing more than five million displaced people in 2020, a new report by the International Organisation for Migration has revealed. Terrorism, armed conflict and extreme weather events have caused large displacements of people.

Source: The East African

19/1/2022: The international initiative aimed at ensuring equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines lacks funds to pay for rollouts of donated doses over the coming months. Many nations have failed to meet the goal to vaccinate 40% of their populations by the end of 2021.

Source: Devex

18/1/2022: An international team of researchers has concluded that humanity has exceeded a planetary boundary related to environmental pollutants, including plastics. The rate at which these pollutants are released far exceeds the capacity of governments to assess the risks.

Source: Stockholm Environment Institute

17/1/2022: The first two years of the pandemic have seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million people forced into poverty. Meanwhile the world's ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes.

Source: Oxfam International

17/1/2022: In Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, the countries worst affected by three years of drought, projections indicate that 25 million people will face high acute food insecurity by mid-2022. The UN says that $130 million of aid is urgently needed to provide time-critical assistance.

Source: UN Food and Agriculture Organization

14/1/2022: Amnesty International has drawn attention to the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics as an opportunity to push for human rights improvements in China. The event will take place against a backdrop of myriad ongoing human rights violations in the country.

Source: Amnesty International

14/1/2022: Autocratic leaders faced a significant backlash in 2021, says Kenneth Roth, executive director at Human Rights Watch. However, many democratic leaders have been too mired in short-term preoccupations to address serious problems such as climate change.

Source: Human Rights Watch

13/1/2022: A prominent rights group in Egypt, the Arabic Network for Human Rights, is ending operations following police arrests and threats against the network's team. A controversial new NGO law places severe curbs on the work of civil society groups.

Source: DW

12/1/2022: World Bank President David Malpass has urged China, a major creditor of poor countries, to participate fully in debt relief efforts. He proposes accelerating the framework for debt restructuring agreed by the G20 group of nations in November 2020..

Source: DW