The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) shipped 5,612,257 student kits, 201,416 cartons of chalk, and 5,106,885 school bags for primary and intermediate-level schoolchildren in Iraq from the start of the Iraq War in 2003 through November 2004 … Through UNICEF's “Immunization plus” program, the distribution of high-dose vitamin A capsules has averted at least 1 million child deaths since 1998 … Since the UN–sponsored Global Polio Eradication Initiative began in 1988, worldwide cases of polio have plummeted from 350,000 in 1988 to 1,263 in 2004 … UNICEF aims to eradicate polio from the globe by 2008 … The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has won two Nobel Peace Prizes in the past half-century … Since 2002, the UNHCR has helped build 100,000 shelters in Afghanistan, providing homes for up to half a million Afghans … In 2004 alone, the UNHCR allocated $22 million to finance the construction of another 20,500 shelters … In November 2004, 500 families displaced by fighting in Fallujah, Iraq, received 2,000 blankets and 1,000 mattresses from the UNHCR … In the three months following the Indian Ocean tsunami, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) moved more than 55 tons of food aid to 1.75 million tsunami survivors … On March 25, 2005, the WFP declared that starvation and widespread malnutrition had been averted in tsunami-affected regions … In September 2004, the WFP moved 23,738 metric tons of food to feed more than 1.3 million people in the Darfur region of Sudan, exceeding its own target by more than 100,000 … The UN Development Programme has opened seven disarmament transit sites to demobilize 15,000 ex-combatants, including some 6,000 child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo … From August 1997 to July 2000, the UN Mine Action Service cleared nearly 3.6 million square yards of land in northern Iraq … It destroyed 7,500 anti-tank and anti-personnel land mines and unexploded ordnances, and provided medical treatment and prosthetics to more than 27,000 people … 117 suspected war criminals have been detained by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia … As of March 2005, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda had handed down 17 judgments … Another 25 accused are on trial … more than 80 percent “cybersquatting” (the abusive registration of trademarks as domain names) allegations arbitrated by the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) were decided in favor of the trademark holder.
