REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE

Marie Heuzé, the Director of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing which provided information about the Secretary-General's activities in Asia; the 2005 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons; Geneva activities; Darfur and other issues. Spokespersons and Representatives of UNESCO, the High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Food Programme, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the International Organization for Migration participated in the briefing.

Secretary-General's Activities in Asia

Mrs. Heuzé said Secretary-General Kofi Annan was continuing with his Asian tour. Over the weekend, he had been in Indonesia where he had participated in the Golden Jubilee commemoration of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. In a press conference in Jakarta on 23 April, the Secretary-General, commenting on the situation between Japan and China, said he hoped that the meeting between the two leaders would help reduce the temperature a little bit and set their relations back on track. On the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's nuclear capabilities, the Secretary-General said attempts were being made to resolve the issue diplomatically through the six party talks and he hoped that the talks would resume in the not too distant future. He urged North Korea to work with the others and to resolve the crisis.

A transcript of the press conference was available in the press room.

A statement issued by the Secretary-General yesterday said he was dispatching a team to verify whether there had been a full and complete withdrawal of all Syrian troops, military assets and the intelligence apparatus from Lebanon in keeping with Security Council resolution 1559 (2004). Copies of the statement were available in the press room. The Secretary-General had asked the mission to complete its work as soon as possible. He would present the findings of the verification team to the Security Council in a report that would supplement the information in his upcoming report on the implementation of Security Council resolution 1559 which was expected to be released today in New York.

Copies of a statement by the Secretary-General on the elections in Togo were also available.

2005 NPT Review Conference

The Director said the 2005 Review Conference of the parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons would be held from 2 to 27 May in New York. Available in the Documentation Centre was a press kit on the Review Conference. For journalists who wanted to link the Review Conference to the Secretary-General's important reform proposals concerning nuclear and disarmament issues, the "In Larger Freedom" report included a section on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and it was available in the Documentation Centre.

The Director recalled that the three main pillars of the package of reforms proposed by the Secretary-General were development, security, and human rights.

Geneva Activities

Mrs. Heuzé said the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights had started its thirty-fourth session yesterday at the Palais des Nations. Today, the Committee would start its consideration of the initial report of Zambia. During this session, the Committee would also be considering reports from China, Serbia and Montenegro and Norway.

The Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families was holding its second session this week at the Palais Wilson. The Committee's meetings were public. A background press release was available and a round-up would be prepared at the end of the session.

The Director said that Sergei Ordzhonikidze, the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva, had represented the United Nations at Pope Benedict XVI's installation mass last weekend.

Darfur

Jennifer Pagonis of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said that UNHCR was alarmed by the fact that abandoned villages in West Darfur were once again being burned to discourage the people who had once lived there from returning home. UNHCR was concerned that acts like this, on top of the displacement of some 2 million people from their homes, threatened to change the social and demographic structure of Darfur irrevocably.

Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Programme said that she had been talking to journalists last week about WFP fears that it would have to cut its non-cereal food rations in Darfur by 50 per cent. Luckily, donors had responded. The United States had promised 14,000 tons of non-cereal food aid so that meant that rations for May would not have to be cut. However, WFP was still missing 41 per cent of its appeal for $ 468 million for Darfur. The number of persons in need of food aid in Darfur was more than had been estimated, and WFP believed that some 3.25 million persons now needed food aid.

Other

Ingeborg Breines, Director of the Liaison Office of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Geneva, said UNESCO was organizing with the African Academy of Languages and La Francophone a meeting in Bamako, Mali from 6 to 7 May on multilingualism for cultural diversity and participation of all in cyberspace. This was part of thematic preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society II.

Ms. Breines said every year since the adoption of the Dakar Framework of Action on "Education for All" (EFA), an EFA week was held in April to take stock of developments. This week was EFA week 2005 and the focus this year was on universal primary education. An UNESCO Open Forum would be held on 29 April from 10:30 a.m. to noon to commemorate the week.

Jennifer Pagonis of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said that UNHCR would tomorrow be launching the first phase of a programme to return some 58,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo's Equateur province who had been living in the Republic of Congo for the past six years. This was one of the most logistically challenging refugee voluntary repatriation programmes that UNHCR had undertaken anywhere in the world. Some 8,000 refugees had already signed up to repatriate and UNHCR hoped to help as many as 24,000 refugees voluntarily return home by the end of the year.

Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Programme said that two million Kenyans, particularly in the arid and semi-arid land in the northern and eastern parts of the country, would need food assistance until August, despite a general improvement in weather conditions. Between March and August, WFP planned to provided 125,000 metric tons of food aid worth $ 52 million to 1.6 million drought affected persons, plus an additional 420,000 school children. Available was a press release with more details at the back of the room.

Samar Shamoon of the World Intellectual Property Organization said today was World Intellectual Property Day. A press release would be released shortly. A conference on dispute resolution and international signs and technology collaboration was also rounding up its work today. And from 27 to 29 April, WIPO's programme budget committee would be meeting.

Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that Dennis McNamara, the Director of the Division of Internally Displaced Persons, would be holding a press conference on Wednesday, 27 April at 11 a.m. in press room 1 after his return from a mission to Nepal. On another issue, Ms. Byrs said OCHA and UNDP wanted to hold a briefing on the reconstruction phase following the tsunami and it was agreed to hold it at the beginning of next week.

Ms. Byrs said in Côte d'Ivoire, OCHA and local non-governmental organizations had sent a mission to Korhogo in the north of the country to identify water points, including wells and bore holes, that could be used or refurbished and chlorinated in order to provide clean drinking water to Korhogo residents. The mission had identified 15 such water points. In Korhogo, it was estimated that some 150,000 were without access to potable water and that more than 65 per cent (compared to 35 per cent before the war) of the village pumps in the north had broken down. The water shortage was primarily due to the poor condition of the hydraulic infrastructure, to the lack of new financing for the rehabilitation and extension of existing facilities, and to the low level of rains, which resulted in small quantities of water in the dam that fed the northern region. The inhabitants of Bouake were also faced with frequent water cuts due primarily to a lack of repair and maintenance of the water system. Ms. Byrs recalled that only 1 per cent of the UN's appeal for $ 39 million for 2005 for Côte d'Ivoire had been funded.

Ms. Byrs said available at the back of the room was a press release from the Permanent Mission of Belarus in Geneva on the nineteenth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

Jemini Pandya of the International Organization for Migration said that in Indonesia, IOM was today handing over the first nine of thousands of pre-fabricated housing units which it planned to build in Aceh for vulnerable families made homeless by the 26 December tsunami. After the tsunami, which left more than 500,000 Acehnese homeless, the Indonesia authorities had asked IOM for help and IOM had agreed in principle to provide up to 11,000 semi-permanent homes, subject to available funding.

Ms. Pandya said that an IOM charter flight left Guinea-Conakry in West Africa this morning for Australia carrying 375 Liberian refugees who had been accepted for resettlement. For many in the group, their arrival in Australia would be the end of years of flight from multiple civil wars in West Africa.

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