A campaign to raise US$ 220 million to help children of conflict was launched Wednesday by the UN refugee agency at the annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York.

Speaking at a press conference, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, called the ninemillion initiative "a means of ensuring that vulnerable children are fully able to realize their right to an education."

Batken Oblast, Kyrgyz Republic

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Kyrgyzstan and Batken local authorities will launch a new programme committing more than $200,000 USD to ensure the rights children in Batken to early childhood development, education and social protection.

GENEVA – The UN refugee agency is relieved that 149 Hmong refugees held in a detention center in Thailand have now called off their hunger strike, but the agency remains alarmed at their living conditions and their health and wellbeing. UNHCR calls on the Thai government to release them – all recognized refugees – from detention.

UNIFEM Regional Office for CIS announces Call for Proposals for the UN Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women for 2007.

GENEVA – UNICEF and the UN refugee agency today issued a $129 million joint appeal aimed at getting tens of thousands of uprooted Iraqi children back in school.

Warning that a generation of Iraqis could grow up uneducated and alienated, the two UN agencies presented a plan to support host governments such as Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon in providing schooling for an additional 155,000 young Iraqi refugees during the 2007-08 school year.

On 4 December 2006, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, IOM launched the First Travelling Film Festival on Migrant and Human Rights in Central AsiaKazakhstan and then further travelled to Kyrgyzstan in December 2006. The films will travel to Tajikistan in February 2007. Screenings have been organized within the local communities, including schools and universities, where a specially prepared tutorial material has been presented and distributed. entitled “Rights in the Spotlight”. Funded by the Royal Danish

Radio Free Europe.

A Tajik goes to Russia to work; a Kyrgyz earns money in Kazakhstan and sends it home to Bishkek. Despite the negative images often associated with laborers seeking employment abroad, experts increasingly see positive aspects, as well. RFE/RL correspondent Richard Solash spoke with Claus Folden of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Vienna about migration patterns in the former Soviet Union.