The Rohingya crisis remains one of the most enduring humanitarian and political failures in South and Southeast Asia. Since the 2017 mass expulsion from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, Bangladesh has hosted more than one million refugees in Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char, while Myanmar has failed to create conditions for safe return. What began as an emergency response has hardened into protracted displacement marked by statelessness, insecurity, aid dependency, and diplomatic fatigue. Repatriation is repeatedly presented as the preferred durable solution, yet every major attempt has failed because the core political question remains unresolved: the Rohingya cannot safely return to a state that denies them citizenship, protection, and equal belonging.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is battling the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, with
United Nations officials warning that hunger is actively undermining efforts to contain the spread.
In the three years since the outbreak of the Sudanese Civil War, the humanitarian crisis has deteriorated significantly, with the United Nations underscoring a blatant disregard for international humanitarian law among warring parties. This includes the deliberate targeting of civilians in residential areas, widespread sexual violence, and attacks on critical infrastructure that have hindered aid efforts and pushed communities to the brink of collapse. To manage rising military expenses, the warring parties have increasingly relied on the exploitation of trade routes and territories, prompting humanitarian experts to express concern about a persistent, self-sustaining “war economy.”
On Monday July 20,
a team from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) visited two displacement sites in Gaza where they found two family tents decimated by domestic fires. This incident is indicative of the increasing frequency of domestic fires in Gaza.
Seventy-five years after the Refugee Convention was opened for signature on 28 July 1951, it remains the foundation of the international refugee protection system and one of the most consequential international legal instruments ever adopted.
Throughout 2026, the humanitarian crisis in Sudan has deteriorated significantly, prompting the United Nations (UN) to raise alarm over the escalation of human rights violations. Persistent clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continue to cause mass civilian casualties, drive widespread displacement, and obstruct the delivery of life-saving aid. As a result, war-torn communities are being pushed further into catastrophe, struggling with severe shortages of essential basic services and the rapid spread of infectious disease.
CIVICUS speaks about efforts to use the 2026 FIFA World Cup to highlight Mexico’s enforced disappearance crisis with Ana Enamorado, a Honduran national who continues to search for her missing son in Mexico, and founder of the Regional Network of Migrant Families.
Landslides and flooding triggered by heavy monsoon rains swept through the world’s most densely populated concentration of refugee camps this week, killing at least 14 Rohingya refugees, most of them women and girls.
In recent weeks, Venezuela’s humanitarian situation has deteriorated sharply following the twin earthquakes on June 24. Marking the strongest seismic event since 1990, the earthquakes and subsequent aftershocks have resulted in a significant loss of life, widespread damage to critical infrastructure, and considerable disruption to livelihoods and humanitarian response efforts.
For a generation, no foreign leader bet more heavily on a single American president than Benjamin Netanyahu bet on Donald Trump. Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, tore up the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and in February 2026 joined Israel in the opening strikes of a war against Iran that Netanyahu had spent three decades urging Washington to wage.
In May, Tunisian lawyer and journalist Sonia Dahmani was handed her second conviction of the year. Her
latest sentence, a two-year jail term, came in reaction to her criticism of poor prison conditions. She previously received an 18-month sentence for calling out the government’s anti-migrant policies. Dahmani faces five more charges under a 2022 cybercrime law that criminalises the spreading of what it calls ‘false information’.
On 21 June Colombians made their choice. By the narrowest of margins,
Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right criminal lawyer who’s never held elected office, became president-elect. Climate activists, human rights defenders, Indigenous communities and peace advocates have the most to lose from the incoming government’s agenda.
Smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia are likely to still be reeling from the fuel and fertilizer crisis caused by conflict in the Middle East when what forecasters expect to be a “super” El Niño arrives later this year.
Armed conflict, economic shocks, and climate pressures are driving worsening food insecurity across many of the world's most vulnerable regions, according to the latest
Hunger Hotspots report outlook for June-November 2026, jointly released by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Nearly nine years after the violent persecution of the Rohingya minority population in Myanmar and the following mass exodus of refugees, over 1.2 million Rohingya currently reside in neighbouring Bangladesh, where they face immense challenges. With the United Nations (UN) recording significant shortfalls in global humanitarian funding, alongside Bangladesh’s diminishing ability to support these populations, experts warn of a deepening humanitarian crisis.
The German government, along with a number of other countries, are currently organising flights to evacuate travellers and influencers stranded in the Gulf states. For many citizens of other nationalities, however, there is no such assistance. They remain stuck in precarious situations, marked by exploitation and insecurity.
In Yemen, increasing funding constraints on humanitarian operations have put millions of civilians in dire need of life-saving assistance amid overlapping crises. Acute food insecurity is a persistent issue, as recent reports from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) give a stark warning of conditions without urgent intervention.
Over the past few years, the humanitarian crisis in Africa’s Sahel region has expanded considerably, largely driven by a surge of violence—particularly in the Central Sahel. Although the crisis has been described by the United Nations (UN) as having “largely faded from the headlines” since its wake in 2012, millions of people across the region are in dire need of humanitarian assistance as civilian displacement, climate shocks, and widespread hunger rapidly spill across borders.
Last week on May 28, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) issued an evacuation
order to Lebanese civilians ordering them to move north of the Zahrani River, approximately 25 miles from the Israeli border, and roughly 20 percent of the Lebanese territory. These new escalations bring the displaced population to more than
1.3 million people, including more than
300,000 of those people being children. 1.3 million people represents approximately 1/4th of the nation's population of 5.3 million.
Since May 16, there has been a significant increase in the number of laboratory-confirmed and suspected Ebola cases reported across the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), primarily in Ituri Province, with additional unrelated cases identified in Kampala, Uganda. Although the outbreak has remained largely confined to that region, it has been heavily linked to areas affected by insecurity, civilian displacement, and mining-related migration, raising concerns among global health experts that the outbreak could spread without effective monitoring and response efforts.
Despite the implementation of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel last October, Israeli forces continue to launch airstrikes into the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This has resulted in extensive destruction of infrastructure, loss of human life and exacerbating immense health needs amid an increasingly strained health system in Gaza.