174 Care Management Journals • Volume 14, Number 3 • 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1891/1521-0987.14.3.174 Although, historically, ageing has not been a major focus at the UN since its founding, older persons and ageing issues have been specifically recognized by the UN in a number of documents, events, and programs as well as implicitly in others. Insofar as UN documents are concerned, older perso...

BACKGROUND Generating estimates of health indicators at the global, regional, and country levels is increasingly in demand in order to meet reporting requirements for global and country targets, such as the sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, such estimates are sensitive to availability of input data, underlying analytic assumptions, variability in statistical techniques, and often h...

The health and human rights communities have much in common. Recently, the international community has begun to devote more attention to the right to the highest attainable standard of health ("the right to health"). Today, this human right presents health and human rights professionals with a range of new opportunities and challenges. The right to health is enshrined in binding international t...

Most books dealing with cities start with international statistics on urbanisation. These figures underline the shift towards an urban world. For instance, it is common to begin by stating, after the UN, that since 2014, 54 % of the world population lives in cities, and that the least urbanised continents, Africa and Asia, are also those experiencing the most rapid urbanisation. We also open wi...

World leaders gather at the United Nations General Assembly in New York this month to mount a response to the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. Gary Humphreys and Fiona Fleck report.

Though there are places and situations that world’s media highlight as examples of worsening conditions and inequalities and obstacles to development, UN statistics show clear and gradual improvements. Yet, there exists new threats to human development that must be dealt with, such as serious environmental issues, increasing scarcity of material and energy sources, that are becoming more and mo...

The ‘Question of Palestine’, as it is known in the United Nations (UN), is the longest unresolved human rights problem on the world organization’s agenda. It is primarily a question about the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. This is a right that, according to well-established international law, existed in favor of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and continues to ex...

In an eVort to protect them from ‘continual fear’ and a life that is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ children, worldwide, have been recognised as having some basic rights. The purpose of these was to provide for each child a protective framework which would allow them to develop physically, psychologically, and emotionally. The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child is clear abou...

The Syrian crisis is considered the 'world's single largest crisis for almost a quarter of a century that has the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation' (UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 2016). The rapid adoption of Facebook among Syrians questions whether it helps in maintaining the social capital of a war-torn nation and a dispersed Syrian population worldwide. D...

This is one in a series of policy briefs commissioned by the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to encourage sound thinking on aspects of globalisation. These briefs have been commissioned from and produced by the GASPP programme, an AngloFinnish research and public information programme based partly in STAKES, Helsinki. The opinions expressed are those of the authors. This initial series of b...