“The main coping strategy adopted by 82 per cent of interviewed beneficiaries was switching to lower quality foods, adversely affecting dietary diversity,” UN World Food Programme (WFP) spokesperson Elisabeth Byrs told reporters in Geneva.

The interviews took place during WFP monitoring visits in seven governorates during April: Damascus, Rural Damascus, Homs, Lattakia, Tartous, Al-Hasakeh and Aleppo.

The number of people begging rose to nine per cent in April, up from five per cent in March, according to the people interviewed, Ms. Byrs said, adding that for them, it was “their only option.”

Since it began in March 2011, the Syrian conflict has left more than 93,000 people dead and another 6.8 million in need of humanitarian assistance.

Housing is of particular concern for families in Rural Damascus, Damascus and Tartous. Forty-two per cent of those interviewed said they need help paying rent. Two or more families live together to share rental expenses, with up to 25 people living in a single two-room apartment, according to the UN agency’s monitoring reports.

Families unable to cover rent are living in uncompleted buildings, abandoned stores, old bus stations, factories or warehouses.

In those areas, along with Aleppo, children of displaced families are not attending schools and some are forced to work to help their families make ends meet, Ms. Byrs said.

Meanwhile, WFP is preparing for the start of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan during the second week of July. The UN agency said it is in the process of increasing its food transports for prepositioning into Syria since organisations assisting with the transport will limit their activities.

WFP said it plans to reach 2.5 million Syrians in June and July, after providing food assistance to almost 2.2 million at 200 locations in all parts of Syria in April.

As highlighted by Ban, the UN continues to provide wide-ranging assistance to millions of people in 59 States and six other areas contaminated by landmines, including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Colombia, Laos, Lebanon and South Sudan. “But more progress is needed,” he warned, most notably in Syria and Mali, where the devastating humanitarian impact of the use of explosive weapons in populated areas is growing.

Between May 2011 and May 2012, at least 4,286 people were killed or injured in incidents related to mines and explosive remnants of war, according to the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS).

Ban said he was “encouraged” by the 161 States that have agreed to the Anti-personnel Mine Ban Convention, which bans the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines. States who are parties to the Convention also agree to destroy anti-personnel mines and assist landmine victims.

He also noted the importance of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, Protocol V on Explosive Remnants of War of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and called for universal adherence to these treaties.

Governments of mine-affected countries which receive UN assistance have the primary responsibility for mine action, UNMAS noted.

There are 14 UN departments, programmes, funds and agencies that provide various types of services, according to the agency. Some of these UN bodies target their services to a particular group of people, such as refugees, or to a special circumstance, such as a humanitarian crisis.

At the end of 2012, these entities agreed on a new strategy to guide UN mine action work through 2018. The new strategy includes for the first time a specific monitoring and evaluation framework to track and measure UN’s work.

The new strategy, Ban said, “sets out a series of steps towards a safer world where individuals and communities can pursue socio-economic development and where survivors are treated as equal members of their societies.”

At a press conference in New York, the Assistant Secretary-General of the Office of the Rule of Law and Security Institutions (OROLSI), Dmitry Titov, stressed to journalists that “mine action is about action” that includes humanitarian action and the removal of mines.

Also speaking to the media, the Chief of UNMAS Programmes, Paul Heslop, said “the battle against mines has been won” but needs sustained funding and international support to sustain it.

He noted the emerging threat caused by abandoned or poorly managed ammunition depots which UNMAS teams are increasingly encountering.

Heslop also spoke about the difficulties of identifying the origins of a landmine or unexploded ordinance, particularly in areas such as Syria where the insecurity prevents demining teams from working, and determining whether it is a new explosive or a legacy from earlier conflicts. If explosive materials had a stamp which read “produced in 2010 in x location, it would be easy, but they don’t,” he said.

In recent years there has been a rapid development and proliferation of robotic weapons, and machines are starting to take the place of humans on the battlefield.

Some military and robotics experts have predicted that “killer robots”—fully autonomous weapons that could select and engage targets without human intervention—could be developed within 20 years.

Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) believe that such revolutionary weapons would not be consistent with international humanitarian law and would increase the risk of death, or injury, to civilians during armed conflict.  A pre-emptive prohibition on their development and use is needed.

A relatively small community of specialists has been debating on the benefits and dangers of fully autonomous weapons; military personnel, scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and lawyers have contributed to the discussion. According to Philip Alston, then UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial,  “the rapid growth of these technologies, especially those with lethal capacities and those with decreased levels of human control, raise serious concerns that have been almost entirely unexamined by human rights or humanitarian actors.” It seems to be time for the broader public to consider the potential advantages and threats of fully autonomous weapons.

The primary concern of Human Rights Watch and IHRC is the impact fully autonomous weapons would have on the protection of civilians during times of war. A report of theirs analyses whether the technology would comply with international humanitarian law and preserve other checks on the killing of civilians; it finds that fully autonomous weapons would not only be unable to meet legal standards but would also undermine essential non-legal safeguards for civilians. The research and analysis strongly conclude that fully autonomous weapons should be banned and that governments should urgently pursue that end.

Robotic weapons, which are unmanned, are often divided into three categories based on the amount of human involvement in their actions: Human-in-the-Loop Weapons: Robots that can select targets and deliver force only with a human command; Human-on-the-Loop Weapons: Robots that can select targets and deliver force under the oversight of a human operator who can override the robots’ actions; and Human-out-of-the-Loop Weapons: Robots that are capable of selecting targets and delivering force without any human input or interaction.

Fully autonomous weapons, which are the focus of the  Human Rights Watch and IHRC  report, do not yet exist, but technology is moving in the direction of their development and precursors are already in use. Many countries employ weapons defence systems that are programmed to respond automatically to threats from incoming munitions. Other precursors to fully autonomous weapons, either deployed or in development, have anti-personnel functions and are in some cases designed to be mobile and offensive weapons.

As the report shows, robots with complete autonomy would be incapable of meeting international humanitarian law standards; and given military plans to move toward increasing autonomy for robots should undertake formal assessments of their impact.   The rules of distinction, and military necessity, are especially important tools for protecting civilians from the effects of war;  fully autonomous weapons would lack the human qualities necessary to meet the rules of international humanitarian law.  For example, distinguishing between a fearful civilian and a threatening enemy combatant requires a soldier to understand the intentions behind a human course of actions, something a robot could not do.

By eliminating human involvement in the decision to use lethal force in armed conflict, fully autonomous weapons would undermine  non-legal protections of civilians. First, robots would not be restrained by human emotions and the capacity for compassion, which can provide an important check on the killing of civilians. Emotionless robots could, therefore, serve as tools of repressive dictators seeking to crack down on their own people without fear their troops would turn on them. Second, although relying on machines to fight war would reduce military casualties, it would also make it easier for political leaders to resort to force since their own troops would not face death or injury.

“The truth is that the Security Council has become an obstacle to international efforts to address and solve situations such as in Syria,” Iceland’s Foreign Minister, Össur Skarphéðinsson, said in his speech to the 67th Assembly’s General Debate, at UN Headquarters in New York.

More than 18,000 have been killed and hundreds of thousands more driven from their homes in fighting between the Government and opponents in the Middle Eastern country.

“The Syrian problem is also a wake-up call for the UN with regard to the Security Council. Syria has demonstrated how arcane the Council is, and how out-of-tune it is with the needs of the modern world,” he added of the 15-member body, in which a veto from one of its five permanent members can trump a decision by all 14 others.

Resolutions to address the Syrian situation have twice been vetoed in the past year, most recently in July.

“Thousands of innocent people, not least innocent children, are losing their lives due to an oppressive regime,” Mr. Skarphéðinsson told the gathered delegates, on the fifth day of the General Debate. “The international community must unite to end the violence and we must make a better effort to seek a political and peaceful solution for the sake of the Syrian people.

“We must also ensure that those, on both sides, who commit atrocities, will at the end of the day face their responsibility in an international court of law.”

The Foreign Minister also strongly criticized Israel for its blockade of Gaza and the violation of the human rights of the Palestinians in the West Bank. He also appealed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to bomb Iran over that country’s nuclear programme and to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not to build a nuclear bomb.

The call for strengthening the UN to endow it with the capability to forestall crises such as the one now engulfing Syria was echoed by Foreign Minister Nebojša Kaluderovic of Montenegro.

“The scale and consequences of violence in Syria serve as a stern reminder of the importance of preventive measures in preserving international peace and security, which requires enhancement of the UN preventive capacities and the role of dialogue and mediation in peaceful conflict resolution,” he said to the Assembly.

“Montenegro strongly advocates an approach that strives towards an early prevention and elimination of threats before they evolve into sources of conflict,” he added, pledging to increase his country’s participation in peacekeeping operations in accordance with its capacities.

Calling the Syrian crisis an “existential challenge” to the UN, in her remarks to the Assembly, Liechtenstein’s Foreign Minister Aurelia Frick called on the Council’s five permanent members – China, France, Russia, United Kingdom and United States – to give up their right of veto in matters of atrocities.

“We ask them to acknowledge that the Council must at all times act in accordance with the purposes and principle of the United Nations,” Ms. Frick said. “And we therefore request that they pledge not to use the veto to block Council action aimed at preventing or ending genocide, crime against humanity and war crimes.”

In his address to the General Debate on Friday, Andorra’s Foreign Minister, Gilbert Saboya Sunyé, said that for all its shortcomings, the world was still a much better place thanks to the United Nations.

“Although the way the United Nations system works is indeed far from optimal, we should not forget however that what today is reality seemed an unattainable dream a century ago,” he said. “We should move on from talk of dreams and progress to talk of ambition. We should move on from dreaming about change to having the ambition to change.”

The European Ministers are among of scores of world leaders and other high-level officials presenting their views and comments on issues of individual, national and international relevance at the Assembly’s General Debate, which ends on 1 October.

Unfortunately Hungary’s record in bringing Nazi war criminals to justice has not been particularly impressive, and as Zuroff states: “ Csatáry had to be declared an official suspect” before even considering his questioning or arrest. Hence the mobilization of the journalists, who proceeded to photograph Csatáry and report his whereabouts on Sunday, 15th July 2012. However, it must be said that the tabloid acted following details the Wiesenthal Center had released last September; which were acquired by the Center after paying an informer 25,000 dollars.

The most interesting part of the story seems to be that Csatáry was not in hiding. He was living in Budapest under his real name. What is more, the Canadian authorities had found out about his past in 1997, when his false identity was unmasked, and his Canadian citizenship was revoked by the federal Cabinet for lying on his citizenship application. In fact, Csatáry fled Hungary in 1949, claiming to be a Yugoslav national, settled in Montreal as an art dealer, and became a Canadian citizen in 1955. When his real identity was found out, he quietly fled the country before being deported – he was sentenced to death by a court in Czechoslovakia in absentia in 1948.

Is the monstrous so banal to escape our glance, and be able to hide among us, undisturbed? Or is it time that dims our sight, soothes the pain, and inclines us to forget? To let go of such repugnant people is easier than to deal with them, as the simple truth of their most heinous actions disturbs our safe, comfortable lives; it reminds us that most actions are but different means chosen to arrive at what is considered ‘living well.’

Maybe criminals of war go out of fashion, as trends do; after all, there are so many new ones each year. Or maybe there is only this uneasy truth; the survivors die of old age, and the memory of the pain that racked their entire body dies as well. And as this happens, their tyrant is safer and safer.

Time seems to be every war criminal’s best friend. This is the simple, banal reason, a person like László Csizsik-Csatáry was allowed to have a life, when he crushed so many of them. In 1944, Csizsik-Csatáry was the Royal Hungarian Police commander in the city of Kassa in Hungary (now Košice in Slovakia). He was in charge of a Jewish ghetto and helped organize the deportation of Jews people to Auschwitz. Witnesses testified he exercised his authority very inhumanely. According to documents uncovered by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, he took pleasure in beating women, and forced them to dig ditches in the frozen ground with their bare hands. As Hungary’s top holocaust historian Laszlo Karsai told to ABC News, “there are two testimonies of German officers in Kosice who had to stop him from torturing Jewish women.” Peter Feldmajer, the president of the Jewish community in Hungary, reveals that “Csizsik-Csatáry created a camp for torturing the rich so they would confess where they have hidden the money.”

What is the course of action a man such as this one deserves? What is the reaction of people confronted by a war criminal who opens his door to journalists in his underpants and socks, at 97? Can this image of vulnerability hinder the exercise of justice? It might.

When asked if he is confident the Hungarian justice authorities would bring Csatáry to trial quickly, Efraim Zuroff said: “How can I be confident? I can’t be confident of that. I can hope that it can happen, the only good news is that he’s very healthy, as far as we know he’s still driving a car.”

To bring to trial László Csizsik-Csatáry is a matter of historical justice. To record into history that this criminal of war has underwent a trial is a matter of ethics, and a responsibility of the present towards the future generations. Only justice recorded in history can stay with us long enough to offer closure, and to bring resolution of this significant event in the lives of the victims in Hungary and Slovakia.

It is a sad thought to imagine that the present could be so forgetful to prevent the trial from taking place, to hypocritically dismiss László Csizsik-Csatáry’s responsibility due to his age. No crime is a thing of the past till the people who committed it are brought to justice; time cannot wash away a crime, not even when it is unspoken of for decades.

“Halfway through this year we are seeing people in desperate need in twenty countries, whose lives and livelihoods have been shattered by conflict, hunger and disaster,” said the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Valerie Amos.

“As well as providing effective emergency aid, humanitarian organizations are also working to improve the resilience of communities so that they can better cope with the impact of future natural disasters and conflicts,” she added.

In a news release, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which Amos heads, noted that the number of people needing assistance had risen from 51 million to 62 million – an increase of more than 20 per cent – during the first half of this year.

A large number of these people are in the African continent, with more than 18 million people facing a severe food and nutrition crisis in countries of the Sahel region, which includes Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and parts of Sudan, Cameroon and Nigeria.

Conflict has worsened the situation in Mali, as well as in South Sudan, which is coping with increasing numbers of refugees from Sudan who have fled conflict in border areas.

Food insecurity, malnutrition and insecurity have also worsened the situation in Yemen, where 60 per cent of children under five are chronically malnourished – a rate second only to Afghanistan, where so far this year, more than 200,000 people have been affected by some 300 natural disasters. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people are being affected by the intensifying armed conflict in Syria, which has caused many to flee to neighbouring countries.

To respond strategically to major crises and monitor the effectiveness of their work, OCHA said that some 560 humanitarian aid organizations are using the Consolidated Appeal Process, a tool used by aid organisations to plan, implement and monitor their activities together. Collaborating in the world’s crisis regions, they produce appeals, which they present to the international community and donors.

As of today, the agency reported, humanitarian partners have raised their funding requirements, from $7.8 billion, at the beginning of the year, to $8.8 billion. However, while 45 per cent of the funding required has been received, a gap of $4.8 billion for what is left of the year remains.

“We have reached at least 21 million people so far with humanitarian aid, but our partners need further resources to reach everyone in need,” said Amos. “I commend humanitarian donors for maintaining their generosity and commitment to effective, coordinated and timely aid.”

“The signature of the action plan will be critical for the professionalization of the security forces, and will contribute positively to the ongoing stabilisation of Somalia,” the Secretary-General’s Special Representative and head of the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS), Augustine Mahiga, said in a news release.

The action plan, signed at a meeting of the International Contact Group on Somalia, taking place in the Italian capital of Rome, outlines concrete steps to be taken by the Government to ensure a child-free national army. The ICG is composed of representatives of the United Nations and its diplomatic partners in support of efforts to restore peace and stability in Somalia.

“I strongly urge the governments present here at the ICG to come forward and provide the necessary funding for the release and reintegration of these children,” Mahiga said.

According to UNPOS, the plan was signed by the Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister of Somalia, Mr. Hussein Arab Isse, and, on behalf of the UN, by Mahiga. The Somali minister also committed to sign an action plan to protect children from being killed or maimed, and this second action plan will be signed later this month in Mogadishu, Somalia.

In the plan, the Somali Government commits to end and prevent recruitment of children in Somalia’s National Armed Forces; reintegrate all children released from the armed forces with the support of the UN; criminalize the recruitment of children through national legislation; and provide the UN with unimpeded access to military installation to verify the presence of children.

Since 2007, the Transitional Federal Government has been listed on the UN Secretary-General’s list of parties to conflict who recruit and use children. Full compliance with the action plan will result in the Government being removed from the list.

“I am encouraged to hear that the Government has committed to sign a similar agreement to end the killing and maiming of children,” said the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy. “Somalia must now sign and ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocols.”

After decades of warfare, Somalia has been undergoing a peace and national reconciliation process, with the country’s Transitional Federal Institutions currently implementing the so-called Roadmap for the End of Transition in Somalia, devised in September last year, that spells out priority measures to be carried out before the current transitional governing arrangements end on 20 August.

What triggered interest and attention, as judge Richard Joseph Goldstone stated when serving as first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, was evidence on the magnitude of rape in Bosnia. In fact, the European investigators calculated that during the Yugoslavian wars all parties committed sexual abuses; however, 20.000 Muslim women and girls were raped by Bosnian Serbs as a strategy to terrorize people in 1992, and the number in itself was alarming. Hence, only shocking numbers persuaded the court to focus on sexual assaults and organized rape, and to give it a place in international laws as a crime against humanity.

At the present time, the news talks about the use of rape in Syria, where government forces and pro-government militia members assaulted women and girls during home raids, and use rape as a form of torture on people detained in prisons. As a result, questions arise about the contemporary use of rape – a weapon able to hit its victim on several levels, and for a prolonged time.

It is a fact that rape has historically been used as a weapon of war, but also of intimidation. And if rape is always appalling, it is damaging in a very specific way within conservative communities, where women who have been raped are cast aside as socially unfit, and often murdered to ‘clean’ what is perceived as dishonour to their relatives. This tragedy hits many families, within and outside the borders of Europe.

In the Middle East, rape often seems to be a tool of social repression, and it is hardly considered an act of warfare, or a crime against humanity. For example, rape was used excessively during Moammar Qaddafi’s attempt to remain in power in Libya, and it was hardly spoken of. Only the desperate act of Ms Iman Al-Obeidi, the lady who walked into a Tripoli’s hotel filled with foreign journalists and revealed she was raped by government authorities, brought the Qaddafi regime’s use of rape as an instrument of political repression to international attention.

In another case, when in January 2011 activists began to call for democracy in Khartoum, Sudan, rape as a weapon to intimidate was not far behind. Safiya Ishaq, a 25-year-old fine arts student, attended the rallies and handed out flyers on campus. A couple of weeks later, she was kidnapped by National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) agents. She was tortured and gang raped multiple times as a punishment for her activity, and a message to others. The fact that a Sudanese woman spoken publicly about being raped shocked the country’s conservative society. As a result, Ishaq was forced to flee Sudan for her own safety.

In another case, on March 2011, when Egyptian protesters returned to Tahrir Square and expressed frustration with the slow pace of reforms, the Egyptian military not only arrested several women, and charged them with prostitution since they mingled with men in the crowd, but forced them to submit to ‘virginity checks.’ The same authorities, in November 2011, arrested Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy, broke her left arm and her right hand, and sexually assaulted her. Another case of soldier’s misbehaviour, or an act of war against freedom?

Often people assert that sexual violence is a natural part of any conflict situations, and rape springs from a wish of men to humiliate enemies by raping ‘their’ women, implanting sperm, and wiping out the enemy’s ethnicity. This kind of thinking do not consider women as autonomous human beings; on the contrary, it focuses on their bodies as commodities. It justifies violence, and the tyrannical wish to control women, humiliate them, and violate them. What is more, it confines women to a condition of submission dictated by men’s functional necessities, which is hardly conceivable or acceptable today.

Thus, in the end, the proclamation of rape as a gender-related crime in 1996 was a great step forward, but it can not put our hearts at rest.

What about countries like Yemen, where rape is felt as irrelevant, almost natural? Before the uprising of February 2011, violence against women was not a public issue, and it was the norm. Women’s role in society was clear, and it still is; article 32 of Yemen’s Constitution describes women as ‘sisters of men’, subsidiary to men rather than persons in their own right. An Amnesty International report in 2009 found out that violence against women was heavy, persistent, and socially acceptable. Therefore there existed no provision in Yemeni law covering any kind of violence against women. Fortunately, when the uprising began, issues of gender-based oppression were forced to the surface, and taken into account, due to the presence of women among the activists.

More attention to woman’s condition in Yemen might be paid in the near future due to the fact that in 2011 Tawakkul Karman was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The female Yemeni activist has been jailed many times, faced repercussions after publishing a paper condemning ultra-conservative party members for blocking a bill to make it illegal to marry girls under the age of 17, and narrowly escaped with her life when a female assassin tried to stab her.

To her, and to many women, the key to the problem seems to be what people are educated to consider natural before any social riots, or war destabilises their world. For example, it’s true that men rape in groups out of social pressure to prove their masculinity, and that this conduct can be anticipated in case of war; especially if officers order men to rape as proof of loyalty, or to share culpability. However, it is profoundly horrid that nowadays a human being can still feel the need to hurt another one, to prove himself to others.

As for the victims, in between the helpless expression of men who love them and the fact that men hardly understand what happened to them, the hardest thing seems to be the doubt women read in their men’s eyes on a daily basis. Even if these men understand the women’s intention to take the case to court, and make it a matter of principles and justice, they still remain somehow detached, somehow partisans of a male comradeship hard to crack.

It is arguable that society, no matter the country, crashes against rape as if against something rather ineffable; silence dominates, indifference covers what goes unseen and surfaces in the victim’s life only with time. Sometime for a victim of rape, there is only the consolation of knowing she is not alone: as for some women survivors of brutal rape in Congo, who were rejected by their families, and resolved to emigrate to Italy. There they met some Italian women victims of rape, who were divorced by their husbands or left by their boyfriends since they became socially unfit; the sharing of rage and pain made them feel better.

As a woman, I find no pity in my heart for the man who rapes, no justification, or pardon. As Christy Leigh Stewart stated: “You keep the title of ‘president’ even if you served only one term. The same goes for rapists,” and there is no prison, or punishment, able to take off them the shame of being so disgustingly weak.