David Malet, American University School of Public Affairs
Many of the men and women who left homes in the West to join ISIS or similar terrorist organizations in Syria and Iraq as fighters or supporters now want to come home. Should they be allowed back?
Despite the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, signatories have never made an effort to end mass killings.
China is influential, but would not have succeeded in changing the UN human rights system without quiet consent from countries who wished to trade with it, including Canada.
The United Nations Declaration on sustainable development stresses “leaving no-one behind,” but what about the factors that cause many to be behind in the first place?
The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad should strengthen efforts against the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
For decades, international law did not allow one country to attack another that was using chemical weapons on its own people without UN approval. That’s changed, which means trouble for Syria.
The UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty has given a damning indictment of how austerity has hit the UK. A former UN envoy explains why his calls to uphold social rights are so crucial.
Warren Sanderson, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York); Sergei Scherbov, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and Simone Ghislandi, Bocconi University
Most researchers use the UN’s Human Development Index to measure each country’s progress, but that system has flaws. A new, simplified index aims to do it better.