As the global community observed World Water Day on Monday, the UN secretary-general said access to water is a defense against ill health, indignity, and the challenges of the climate crisis.

In a tweet on Monday, Antonio Guterres said the world should commit to intensifying global efforts so all may have equitable access to this most precious resource.

Every March 22, World Water Day highlights the importance of fresh water. The day is used to advocate for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.

In a statement marking the day Monday, the Cameroonian-based African Center for Advocacy (ACA) said water sector privatization continues to threaten households, health, education, and the integrity of natural environments on the African continent.

The group said water sector privatization will make it impossible for the continent to meet UN Sustainable Development Goal 6, which advocates availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all by the year 2030.

“The theme of the World Water Day commemoration should motivate African governments to take action. It is a reminder that the issue of governance is central to guaranteeing universal access to water,” Younoussa Abbosouka, the group’s advocacy officer, told Anadolu Agency.

“They must therefore reject water privatization in all its forms and prioritize sustained public funding in the sector to meet people’s water needs.”

“The commemoration raises awareness about the 2.2 billion people living without access to safe water and sanitation. The theme of the 2021 commemoration, Value Water, addresses issues of environmental, social, and cultural value that people place on water,” the ACA said, adding that “water is sacred” on the African continent./agencies

The gap between vaccines administered in rich countries and those dispensed through the COVAX program is growing and becoming "more grotesque" every day, the World Health Organization chief said Monday, describing this as "self-defeating."

At a webinar on COVID-19 in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said countries vaccinating younger, healthy people at low risk of disease do so at the cost of the lives of health workers, older people, and other at-risk groups in other countries.

"The world's poorest countries wonder whether rich countries mean what they say when they talk about solidarity," said Tedros.

He added: "The inequitable distribution of vaccines is not just moral outrage. It's also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating."

All or nothing

The WHO-led COVAX program aims to end the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic by ensuring fair and equitable vaccine allocation.

Tedros said Friday that more than 411 million doses of vaccine had been administered globally, but 76% of those doses are in just 10 countries.

Some countries are racing to vaccinate their entire populations, while other countries have nothing, he said Monday.

"These may buy short-term security, but it is a false sense of security," he said.

"The more transmission, the more variants, and the more variants that emerge, the more likely it is that they will evade vaccines."

"We have to increase" vaccine production "as soon as possible," Tedros said.

"If countries won't share vaccines for the right reasons, we appeal to them to do it out of self-interest," said the WHO chief.

He said some countries have set "a great example," such as South Korea, that despite being a high-income country that could easily afford to buy vaccines through bilateral deals, has waited its turn for vaccines through COVAX./aa

Two Istanbul-based Turkish charities on Monday launched a joint project to provide clean water to at least 11,000 Syrians living in refugee camps in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.

According to a statement issued by the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), the digging for the water wells started Monday on the occasion of International Water Day in the Meshed refugee camp.

The joint efforts by the IHH and International Water Wells Foundation will give access to clean water to those living in the refugee camps.

Syria has been embroiled in a civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.

Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced, according to UN officials./aa

Myanmar police on Monday said they detained 41 Rohingya, most of them women, for trying to flee the country’s western Rakhine state with a hope to reach Malaysia.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, a police officer said the Rohingya were stranded off the coast of Ayeyarwady Region after the engine of their motorboat broke down.

A wooden boat drifted at sea for days before arriving at Shwe Thaung Yan beach, a resort area in the Ayeyarwady Region, said Phoe Zaw, a police officer at the Shwe Thaung Yan police station.

The police officer said among the detainees are 32 women and three children.

They are kept in a local school.

“It is difficult to communicate with them because they barely speak Burmese,” he said.

Persecuted people

The Rohingya, described by the UN as the world's most persecuted people, have faced heightened fears of attack since dozens were killed in communal violence in 2012.

According to Amnesty International, more than 750,000 Rohingya refugees, mostly women and children, have fled Myanmar and crossed into Bangladesh after Myanmar forces launched a crackdown on the minority Muslim community in August 2017, pushing the number of persecuted people in Bangladesh above 1.2 million.

Since Aug. 25, 2017, nearly 24,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed by Myanmar’s state forces, according to a report by the Ontario International Development Agency (OIDA).

More than 34,000 Rohingya were also thrown into fires, while over 114,000 others were beaten, said the OIDA report, titled "Forced Migration of Rohingya: The Untold Experience".

Some 18,000 Rohingya women and girls were raped by Myanmar’s army and police and over 115,000 Rohingya homes were burned down while 113,000 others were vandalized, it added./agencies

Britain on Monday said four Chinese officials will be sanctioned over “appalling” human rights violations against ethnic Uyghurs in the northwestern Xinjiang province.

In a statement delivered in the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said sanctions will also be placed on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau.

Branding the violations a "highly disturbing program of repression," Raab said: “This is one of the worst human rights crises of our time and I believe the evidence is clear as it is sobering.”

He added: "It includes satellite imagery, survivor testimony, official documentation and indeed leaks from the Chinese government itself, credible open source reporting including from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, [and] visits by British diplomats to the region that have corroborated other reports about the targeting of specific ethnic groups."

"Expressions of religion have been criminalized, Uighur language and culture discriminated against on a systematic scale," Raab added.

Raab in January blasted China's treatment of Uyghurs as "barbarism."

The UK sanctions follow EU sanctions announced earlier on Monday, accusing four officials of being behind the abuses in Xinjiang.

The Xinjiang region is home to around 10 million Uighurs. The Turkic Muslim group, which makes up a plurality of around 45% of Xinjiang’s population, has long accused China's authorities of cultural, religious and, economic discrimination.

Up to 1 million people, or about 7% of the Muslim population in Xinjiang, have been incarcerated in an expanding network of "political re-education" camps, according to US officials and UN experts./aa

EU foreign ministers agreed on Monday to impose sanctions over human rights violations against the Uyghur minority.

The bloc decided to impose restrictive measures against four Chinese individuals and one company for abuses and the large-scale arbitrary detentions of Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region.

According to the decision, four high-ranking Chinese party officials -- Hailun Zhu, Junzheng Wang, Mingshan Wang and Mingguo Chen -- cannot enter the EU’s territory and their assets in the bloc will be frozen for being “responsible for serious human rights violations in China, in particular large scale arbitrary detentions and degrading treatment inflicted upon Uyghurs and people from other Muslim ethnic minorities, as well as systematic violations of their freedom of religion or belief.”

Hailun Zhu, as Xinjiang’s former secretary of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee, was the architect of the “large-scale surveillance, detention and indoctrination program targeting Uyghurs and people from other Muslim ethnic minorities.”

Junzheng Wangs, as party secretary and political commissar oversaw “the systemic use of Uyghurs and people from other Muslim ethnic minorities as a forced workforce, in particular in cotton fields.”

Mingshan Wang and Mingguo Chen, as former director and deputy party secretary and director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, "introduced a big data program used to track millions of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region and flag those deemed potentially threatening to be sent to detention camps.”

With the same decision, EU foreign ministers also ordered an asset freeze and a travel ban on seven more individuals and three more companies from Russia, North-Korea, Libya, South Sudan and Eritrea.

The measures were adopted in the framework of the EU’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime.

On March 2, the EU adopted sanctions for the first time under this scheme. The measures targeted four high-ranking Russian officials involved in the sentencing and detention of opposition figure Alexey Navalny.

The sanctions regime, adopted in 2020, enables the EU to target individuals, entities and other bodies responsible for serious human rights violations.

The regime implies travel ban and asset freeze for those responsible for human right abuses. EU prohibits European individuals and firms to make funds available to those listed.

In a separate decision, EU foreign ministers imposed restrictions on over 11 members of Myanmar’s military junta over the coup and ensuing repression of civil protesters./aa