Migrants killed in Chiapas, Human Rights, Nobel Peace Prize … Friday’s news

The UN agencies for refugees and migrants have lamented the accident that occurred in Chiapas in which 55 migrants lost their lives and more than a hundred were injured.

More than 150 people, apparently migrants from Central America, were crowded together in the trailer of the truck that overturned in the state of Chiapas.

“Migratory alternatives and legal avenues are required to avoid tragedies like this one,” UNHCR Mexico said on its Twitter account.

According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, so far this year they have registered 1,060 deaths on migration routes in the region, including those of 48 children, although the real number is much higher, because many bodies are never found.

At least 650 people have died while trying to cross the border between Mexico and the United States this year, the highest annual figure since the IOM began documenting deaths in 2014.

At Darien Gap, 42 deaths have been documented, although the Organization says it is “probably a huge underreporting.” Also, at least 41 Cubans have lost their lives trying to reach the United States by sea Y 17 Venezuelans, heading to the Caribbean nations nearby, such as Trinidad and Tobago. The probability that the boats will disappear without a trace means that the actual number of lives lost is much higher.

Deaths on the routes through Mexico are also difficult to document, but nonetheless, the IOM counts more than 750 lives lost since 2014, excluding those near the northern border with the United States.

The “Stay in Mexico” program is “inhumane,” says IOM

Precisely, the International Organization for Migration has asked, once again, to end the program known as “Stay in Mexico” that forces asylum seekers to remain in Mexican territory while their cases are resolved in US courts.

The Joe Biden government has reactivated this policy, created in 2019 by the previous administration, and previously suspended, after a judge ordered it.

The IOM has repeatedly and publicly criticized the program, which it considers “inhumane and contrary to international law”.

© UNICEF / UN0346146 / Diefaga

Children in Congo Brazzaville celebrate and demand their human rights.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis and the expansion of digital technology in all areas of our lives have created new threats to our rights, warns the General secretary on International Human Rights Day.

António Guterres says that the world can “Choose a different path.” Recovery from the pandemic, he adds, should be an opportunity “to restore confidence.”

High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet said inequalities exacerbated by COVID-19 are pushing us back. “In the last two years we have painfully verified the intolerable cost of growing inequalities. Equality is the basis of human rights ”.

The director of the World Food Program receives the Nobel Peace Prize a year later

Today the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in Oslo to journalists Maria Ressa, from the Philippines, and Dmitri Muratov, from Russia. The director of World Food Program has collected the 2020 award, since last year the pandemic prevented the celebration of the gala.

David Beasley said that 811 million people are chronically hungry and 283 million are in a food crisis situation due to warfare, the climate crisis and COVID-19, which has created another “hunger pandemic that is” much worse “than the first.

“Some 45 million people in 43 countries knock on the door of famine, and it is in our power to save them all. They are already desperately hungry and are only a meteorological phenomenon, a military maneuver, a price hike or a supply chain lockdown away from being plunged into catastrophe. That is why I have issued a $ 6.6 billion emergency appeal to the world’s billionaires.. Is it too much to ask of those who reaped $ 1.8 trillion more during the pandemic?