Special envoy Joli can help draw attention to “some of the world’s most difficult refugee situations”
UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie at the annual meeting of the refugee agency's governing body.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Actress Angelina Jolie was asked Tuesday 4 October by the head of the UN refugee organization UNHCR to take on a new role as special envoy, in the wake of several new emergency refugee situations this year.
The invitation was extended by High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres, who recognized her 10 years of service with the agency by asking her to take on an expanded role in some of the world’s most difficult refugee situations.
His request came just as news reports began to flow in of a bomb blast in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Seventy people were reportedly killed and 150 injured, according to Somalia’s President Sharif Sheikh Ahmedhe.
Al-Shabab, which is fighting the government, took responsibility for the suicide bomb. The news is the latest evidence of the rising level of violence in the country, from which people are fleeing in growing numbers.
The Dabaad camps in Kenya, across the border from Somalia, now have nearly half a million people, with 1,000 arriving daily. Some 200,000 Somalis have fled to these camps in the past four months.
UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie at the annual meeting of the refugee agency's governing body.
Jolie is in Geneva for the annual meeting of UNHCR’s executive committee, which oversees funding for the organization and its projects.
She has become one of the best-known goodwill ambassadors for a UN agency, through her regular and frequent visits, on average four a year, to refugee camps around the world, including some in very remote regions. She took on the ambassadorial role in August 2001.
“Today, three-quarters of a million people are at risk of death in the next four months in the Horn of Africa,” she told the executive committee. “The work we are doing needs to scale up to meet the needs of these individuals. How we continue to respond to this period of malnutrition and famine is going to define the work of those NGOs, governments, and international organizations working in the Horn of Africa. It will, quite starkly, determine whether a huge number of people live or die.”
Monday Jolie shared the spotlight with Nasser Salim Ali Al-Hamairy, founder of Yemen’s Society for Humanitarian Solidarity: she co-presented with Guterres the 2011 Nansen Refugee Award, given to the SHS. The prize, widely considered the refugee world’s highest honour, was awarded to the founder and the 290 staff of SHS, a non-governmental organization, for their life-saving work in helping thousands of refugees and migrants who arrive on Yemen’s shores each year.
The staff comb the Yemeni coastline year round, pulling people from the sea and helping them find safety and assistance.
London, England (GenevaLunch) – Some of the most famous clothes from the haute couture wardrobe of actress Audrey Hepburn were sold for £270,000 at an auction in London Tuesday 8 December. Hepburn, who died and was buried in 1992 in Tolochenaz, Vaud, in Switzerland, where she spent much of her adult life, was one of the first Unicef Goodwill ambassadors. Half the money will go to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund and Unicef for their joint venture, “All Children in School” Unicef education project.
The clothes, sold by Kerry Taylor auctions, were from 1953 to the late 1960s.
Goodwill ambassador Jolie with a resident of Chikook, Baghdad © UNHCR
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – UNHCR’s goodwill ambassador, Angelina Jolie, paid a visit to some of the estimated 1.6 million internally displaced people (IDPs) in Iraq Thursday 23 July, her third to the country.
Jolie spoke to some families in the Chikook camp northwest of Bagdhad which houses 20,000 people, mostly women and children, displaced by sectarian violence that wracked the country beginning in 2006.
