The Syrian civil war is an ongoing multi-sided armed conflict in which international interventions have taken place. The war grew out of the unrest of the Arab Spring and escalated to armed conflict after Bashar al-Assad’s government violently repressed protests calling for his removal. Violence in Syria has escalated amid an absence of meaningful efforts to end the war. A confidential list of individuals and units are believed to be responsible for crimes against humanity, breaches of international humanitarian law and gross human rights violations.

Is a world free of nuclear weapons achievable? North Korea is actively developing its nuclear programme, the fate of the Iran nuclear deal is in the balance, and the United States and Russia are both seeking to modernise their nuclear forces. With the Nobel Committee’s decision to honour the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons with the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, the Committee sent a powerful message of concern. In the same year, the General Assembly decided to convene a UN conference to negotiate a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.