UN News Today 30 September 2026 |

Malaysia: UN agency urges safeguards after refugees returned to Myanmar

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has voiced concern over Malaysia’s decision to return nearly 1,500 people to Myanmar where a civil war is still raging.

Deportation of Rohingya refugees began on Tuesday, according to reports. 

UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Edem Wosornu, said that the Myanmar returnees may face serious risks, while “some within the group may be in need of international protection”.

Although Malaysian authorities said the process was voluntary, the UNHCR official noted that those returned had been detained by immigration authorities. 

Here’s UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch:

“The reality is those returned had been held in immigration detention for (too??) long. This raises serious questions about whether decisions to return were genuinely free and well-informed…those that have been returned must have had to make impossible choices: languish in detention or return to Myanmar to risk your life.”

The Rohingya are a mainly Muslim ethnic minority group in Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation where the military and various resistance groups are fighting a civil war. 

Myanmar’s military, which seized power in a coup in 2021, has repeatedly targeted the Rohingya community, notably in 2017, when a widely condemned military operation in Rakhine state forced hundreds of thousands to flee to other countries in Southeast Asia.  

Lebanon: one in five children goes to bed hungry, says UNICEF 

Four in five households in Lebanon struggle to afford basic necessities today, with children increasingly going without food, missing school and being pushed into work amid ongoing conflict. 

That’s the message from the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), whose latest report into the crisis in Lebanon indicates that children go to bed hungry in at least one in five households. 

Some 770,000 children are suffering from “profound psychological distress” too, said UNICEF spokesperson Christophe Boulierac: 

“Yes, we have this very alarming figure, 22 per cent of the household report that their children has gone to bed hungry, but in fact there is more striking than that; the children in Lebanon don’t eat well. Only 10 per cent of the household with children under age five can provide a sufficiently varied diet. What does it mean? It means that the bellies of the children may be full, but their brains and their bodies are not nourished because they are lacking the essential nutrients, the vitamins, the minerals.”

It is nearly six months since a ceasefire agreement between Lebanon and Israel seeking to end hostilities between Lebanon-based Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli military, linked to the US-Iran war. Despite the agreement, airstrikes and demolitions of homes have continued.

And of the more than one million people displaced within weeks of the escalation in March, nearly 330,000 have yet to go home, because of continued attacks and widespread destruction in southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces are occupying what they call a “security zone” north of the Blue Line of separation. 

New alcohol policy gives booze the boot in Latvia – WHO 

To Latvia, where simple public health measures to reduce alcohol consumption have been linked to a “significant decline in deaths”, just months after they took effect.

According to the UN World Health Organization (WHO), deaths that were wholly attributable to heavy drinking decreased by 27 per cent, after the new restrictions came into effect.

Mortality from alcohol poisoning, liver disease and acute pancreatitis that are all associated with regular drinking “fell significantly”, WHO noted, after evaluating data submitted by the Latvian health authorities.

Karina Zalite, head of WHO’s Country Office in Latvia, welcomed the Government’s measures to make alcohol less available, including reducing times when it can be bought, ending instant deliveries when it is purchased online and restricting promotions and sales in gambling venues:

“Alcohol is everywhere in our lives. It’s at celebrations, in sport, at the checkout counters and stores. It’s easy to forget what it really is, an addictive substance and one linked to at least seven types of cancer.”

According to WHO, cancers associated with drinking include bowel cancer and breast cancer. Alcohol use is responsible for approximately 800,000 deaths across Europe every year.

Daniel Johnson, UN News