News stories by Gustavo Capdevila, page 2

GENEVA, Jan 21 (IPS) - The international community has adopted a binding treaty for reducing emissions of mercury, a poisonous heavy metal that harms human health and the ecosystems on which life depends.

GENEVA, Dic 14 (IPS) - The first woman to preside over the United Nations Human Rights Council, Uruguayan diplomat Laura Dupuy, has made it with flying colours through one of the periods of greatest tension and conflict since the council replaced the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 2006.

GENEVA, Sep 20 (IPS) - The impact of human rights education, a rising star, is highlighted in a short documentary sponsored by United Nations experts and civil society.

An expert body of the United Nations has warned the Spanish government that the severe budget cutbacks it is applying must not undermine its commitment to upholding the economic, social and cultural rights of the country's people.

The reason the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is under attack is that rich countries do not want an organisation that carries out independent analysis, Rubens Ricupero, UNCTAD secretary general from 1995 to 2004, told IPS.

Social unrest and demands for change are not a negative thing during times of crisis like today, says Rubens Ricupero, a Brazilian diplomat and thinker.

Research and development, unlike other branches of productive activity, is resisting the ravages of one of the worst financial and economic crises to affect the world in the last 80 years.

Capital punishment continues to exist because in some countries people are barraged with propaganda depicting it as a curb on crime, which it is not, said Federico Mayor Zaragoza, chair of an international commission against the death penalty that inaugurated its new headquarters in Geneva Monday.

The United Nations Human Rights Council should accept responsibility, on behalf of the world forum, for the famine spreading through eastern Africa, and should call for member countries' cooperation to overcome the desperate food crisis there, experts said.