Thalif Deen, Advisor for the United Nations, Civil Society and USA

Thalif Deen has been covering the United Nations since the late 1970s. A former deputy news editor of the Sri Lanka Daily News, he was also a senior editorial writer on the Hong Kong Standard.

Thalif Deen has been runner-up, and cited twice for "excellence in UN reporting", at the annual awards presentation of the UN Correspondents’ Association. A former Information Officer at the UN Secretariat, and a one-time member of the Sri Lanka delegation to the UN General Assembly sessions, he is currently UN Bureau Chief and Regional Director of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and editor in chief of the IPS UN Journal Terra Viva. Since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, he has covered virtually every single major UN conference – on population, human rights, environment, social development, globalization and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). A former Middle East military editor at Jane’s Information Group in the U.S, he is a Fulbright-Hayes scholar with a Master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University, New York.