UNA-Sweden

Despite having existed for over 50 years UNA-Sweden shows no signs of growing old and tired. In fact it´s the opposite: during the past five years the UNAs program has grown to such an extent that the professional staff in Stockholm has nearly doubled.

UNA-Sweden is an umbrella organization supported in around 100 national civil society organizations. It enjoys the support of 7,000 individual members organized in 120 local chapters.

At the moment UNA-Sweden has two major fund-raising campaigns. One is Adopt-a-Minefield which aims to increase public awareness against the use of landmines and to raise money for UN mine clearance work. The Swedish branch of the campaign focuses on mine action in Cambodia and Ethiopia.

The second campaign is carried out in cooperation with the WFP School Feeding Programme. The idea is to offer poor children free lunch at school, something which has several positive effects for the children themselves as well as for their families, communities and countries. The Swedish school feeding campaign cooperates with well-known Swedish restaurants and the coffee shop Barista Fair Trade Coffee. Both campaigns have enrolled famous Swedish entertainers, media representatives and sport stars as ambassadors.

The Millennium Declaration and the MDGs have been central to the work of UNA-Sweden for many years. Extensive activities are carried out in order to increase the awareness of the importance of the MDGs and to influence government policies in this area.

Youth

Young people are an important target group for UNA-Sweden and the organization puts great emphasis on informing and engaging young people. Another important target group is schools. UNA-Sweden has offered the country´s over 800 high schools to become "UN Schools" in order to strengthen their international profiles. The UN schools will be provided with regular information about the UN and receive teachers training and special material and offers.

UNA-Sweden has close cooperation with the UN Associations in South Africa, DR Kongo, Georgia, Tanzania and concerning for instance the promotion of human rights and the Millennium Declaration. In 2007-08, for example, three young Swedes spent six months working for the UN Associations in Georgia, Tanzania and Uganda.

Human Rights

In the field of human rights, UNA Sweden is the coordinator for the National Human Rights Network consisting of 60 Swedish NGOs. The network is divided into several working groups that focus on specific thematic issues. We have a working group that follows the work of the Human Rights Council by attending sessions, producing articles, arranging conferences and in other ways getting the discussions on the Council to the public debate. UNA Sweden is currently writing the shadow report to the CERD committee and is involved in writing the shadow report to the CEDAW committee.

Theme: disarmament

UNA Sweden has worked on peace, security and disarmament issues in various ways over several decades. During the 80s and the last years of the Cold War it arranged the Peoples Parliament for Disarmament, during which civil society representatives gathered to discuss disarmament issues. More recently it coordinated Swedish NGO activities in favour of the establishment of the International Criminal Court.

UNA Sweden is an organization which both debates and informs on UN affairs. In this capacity we often receive and try to answer questions from students on why the UN failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the ongoing mass atrocities in Darfur. We find such failures of the international community to be a threat, not only to future victims of such situations, but to the UN in itself. It is imperative that the world community learns from these mistakes and prevents their future repetition.

To work in this direction UNA Sweden is an active supporter of the concept Responsibility to Protect ("R2P") created by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, ICISS, in 2001. We are pleased that the UN adopted, unanimously, this concept at the 2005 World Summit. We believe, however, that some of the ideas of the ICISS report need further discussion and support. For this purpose UNA Sweden arranges seminars, debates and study groups. Recent speakers at such events include the UNSG special advisor on Genocide, Francis Deng, and the UNSG special advisor on R2P, Edward Luck. We have also initiated cooperation on R2P issues with fellow UNAs.
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Another issue in the field of peace and disarmament that UNA Sweden works with is nuclear disarmament. The international Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction led by Dr. Hans Blix (WFUNA president 2006-2009) presented its final report "Weapons of terror". One of the recommendations in the report was that tactical nuclear weapons should be withdrawn to the five official nuclear weapons states. UNA Sweden supports this idea, as well as the other recommendations made by the Commission, and arranges activities in line with this view.

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