The United Nations is seeking a breakthrough as rival leaders on the island of Cyprus prepare to meet in New York next week for a renewed attempt to revive stalled peace talks, a U.N. envoy said Monday.
Maria Angela Holguin held separate meetings with Greek Cypriot leader Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) President Ersin Tatar, crossing the island's U.N.-patrolled cease-fire line in a day of shuttle diplomacy.
"All this effort the U.N. is doing is for the prosperity of the island, so that the people have a better life," Holguin, who was appointed the U.N. envoy to Cyprus earlier this year, told reporters after meeting Tatar.
"And we continue to work, the commitment of the U.N. is totally for that, so we hope the leaders can think about that, and we have results next week."
The meetings are part of preparations for talks in New York on July 16-17, where U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is due to meet both leaders.
They followed a meeting in Geneva in March, which marked the first meaningful progress in years.
At that gathering, both sides agreed on a set of confidence-building measures, including opening more crossing points across the divide, cooperating on solar energy and removing land mines – steps Guterres described as reflecting a "new atmosphere" and renewed urgency.
"I hope we are going to have many advances on the measures they decided in March," said Holguin.
Cyprus has been mired for decades in a dispute between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, despite a series of diplomatic efforts by the U.N. to achieve a comprehensive settlement.
Ethnic attacks starting in the early 1960s forced Turkish Cypriots to withdraw into enclaves for their safety. In 1974, a Greek Cypriot coup aimed at Greece's annexation led to Türkiye’s military intervention as a guarantor power to protect Turkish Cypriots from persecution and violence. As a result, the TRNC was founded in 1983. The country is fully recognized only by Türkiye, which does not recognize the Greek Cypriot administration in the south.
The internationally recognized Greek Cypriot administration, a member of the European Union, controls the island's majority Greek Cypriot south.
The last major round of peace talks collapsed in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in July 2017.
Meanwhile, a U.N.-backed commission investigating mass disappearances in Cyprus is deploying AI and ground-penetrating radars to expedite the chances of finding the remains of people who vanished in the past conflict.
The Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) leads a team of archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists to help ascertain the fate of 2,002 people who went missing during inter-ethnic strife in the 1960s and the Turkish operation that followed a Greek-inspired coup in 1974. Many were killed and buried in unmarked graves across the island.
Relying heavily on witnesses who are assured anonymity, the exhumation and identification of victims have waned in recent years, in part because of discrepancies in witness accounts, the passage of time and rapidly changing landscapes.
"We plan to enhance our capacities to find answers through new technologies," said Pierre Gentile, the U.N. representative on the CMP, which also includes a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot representative.
Gentile said the CMP would use artificial intelligence to scour digitalized archives for new lines of inquiry and would consider further use of ground-penetrating radars to help find burial areas.
Established in 1981, the CMP started looking for mass graves around 2006. By the end of June 2025, it had located and exhumed 1,707 individuals, with 1,270 remains returned to their families for burial by May 2025.
Although missing persons remain one of the most sensitive issues stemming from Cyprus's division, it is also one of the few areas where Greek and Turkish Cypriots work together on a common humanitarian goal.
"It is a very delicate humanitarian issue, and the work we are doing is holy," said Hakki Muftuzade, the Turkish Cypriot CMP representative. "We are fully aware of the duty we have to fulfil," he said.
