REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE
Yvette Morris, Chief of the Radio and Television Section of the United Nations Office at Geneva, chaired the briefing which also heard from spokespersons and representatives from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the UN Refugee Agency, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the International Labour Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Meteorological Organization.
Sixty-Third General Assembly
Ms. Morris said that the United Nations General Assembly was beginning its sixty-third session today at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Next Tuesday, 23 September, the General Assembly would begin its annual General Debate, in which heads of State and Government, as well as ministers, would participate and make statements.
There would be a number of high-level events during this session, Ms. Morris noted, including a meeting on Monday, on the eve of the General Debate, which would look at the progressive implementation of various commitments regarding Africa’s development needs. Also, later in the Assembly, there would be two days of high-level plenary meetings, on 2 and 3 October, devoted to the midterm review of a plan negotiated in 2003 for measures to help landlocked and transit developing nations; and, on 25 September, there would be a high-level debate on the Millennium Development Goals. A background kit had been distributed last week and was available in the Press Room.
Afghanistan
On Sunday, a UN convoy travelling in Kandahar Province, in southern Afghanistan, had been attacked in a suicide bombing, Ms. Morris reported. Two doctors working for the World Health Organization, as well as their driver had been killed. The doctors had been travelling in clearly marked UN vehicles, taking part in a polio vaccination campaign. The Secretary-General issued a statement condemning the attacks, which he said “show the brutal face of those opposing progress towards peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan”.
Fadéla Chaib of the World Health Organization (WHO) said that this incident underscored the difficult conditions to which international health workers, in particularly those who worked in the partnership to fight polio, were exposed. Those workers were often targets of violence in the areas in which they worked. To date this year, 16 Afghan children had been paralysed by polio, half of whom lived in Kandahar, the province were the attack had occurred. Responding to a query, Ms. Chaib noted that the two doctors had been sent to prepare the logistics for a polio vaccination campaign to target 1.2 million children in the region, which was to have started this week. For the time being, WHO was still assessing the situation to see if it would carry on with the campaign or not.
Rupert Colville of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said that OHCHR was releasing new figures today that showed a sharp increase in the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan during the first eight months of 2008 compared to the same period in 2007. The number of killings by the Taliban and other anti-government forces had almost doubled, and the numbers killed by government and international military forces had also increased substantially. The human rights team attached to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan had recorded a total of 1,445 civilian causalities in the first eight months of 2008 – an increase of 39 per cent compared to the same period last year. “There was substantial evidence indicating that the Taliban are carrying out a systematic campaign of intimidation and violence aimed at civilians they believed to be supportive of the Government, the international community and the military forces”, High Commissioner Pillay had observed. Available were a press release and copies of the report.
Noting that the High Commissioner had called for a “rapid and independent” assessment of deaths caused by air strikes carried out by international forces, a journalist asked what OHCHR’s involvement would be, or had been to date. Mr. Colville gave the example of the recent incident in Shindand, when the UN and the Afghans believe up to 92 civilians had been killed, and a much lower figure was given out initially by the Multinational Forces. Preliminary investigations had been carried out. OHCHR had played a part in that, as had the Government. OHCHR’s position was that there needed to be very clear, very coherent, very transparent investigations into those types of events, which were extremely damaging in terms of public opinion in Afghanistan.
Darfur Appointment
Ms. Morris said that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and the African Union Chairperson, Jean Ping, had appointed Azouz Ennifar of Tunisia as Deputy Joint AU-UN Mediator for Darfur. Mr. Ennifar would work with the Joint AU-UN Chief Mediator for Darfur, Djibril Yipènè Bassolé of Burkina Faso.
Geneva Activities
In Geneva, Ms. Morris said that this morning the Human Rights Council would be wrapping up the debate it had begun yesterday on economic and social rights. Later this morning, Sima Samar, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Sudan, would present her report, containing the latest update on the human rights situation in Sudan, as well as an addendum report on the status of implementation of the recommendations compiled by the Group of Experts mandated by the Human Rights Council. Ms. Samar would hold a press briefing at 1.15 p.m. in Room III.
Thursday, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as head of the High-Level Fact-Finding Mission to Beit Hanoun, would present his report, and a press conference was also scheduled to be held on that day, 18 September, in Room III at 1.15 p.m. The timing was subject to change, but as of now the report was scheduled to be heard first thing in the morning, around 10 a.m.
Today, in Room XIX at the Palais, the last round of open consultations were being held in preparation for the upcoming meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, Ms. Morris said. At 2 p.m. today the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser for Internet Governance, Nitin Desai, and Markus Kummer, the Executive Coordinator of the Forum, would speak to journalists in Press Room I. The next Internet Governance Forum was scheduled to be held in Hyderabad, India, in December 2008.
Sunday was the International Day of Peace, Ms. Morris said, and that would be marked here in the Palais des Nations on Friday, 19 September, with a special programme in the Council Chamber that would include an address by Sergei Ordzhonikidze, the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva. The ceremony was organized by the Non-Governmental Liaison Office of the United Nations Office at Geneva and the Spanish Society for International Human Rights Law. The observance would emphasize the connection between peace and human rights, since it coincides with the sixtieth anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Laurent Moutinot, the President of the Geneva State Council and Kari Tapiola, Executive Director for Standards and Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work at ILO would also be among the speakers. The special event would be held from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Haiti / Caribbean Hurricane Season
Elisabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that in Hurricane affected Haiti the situation remained of grave concern, but for other reasons. Even though the waters were receding and, in particular in Gonaive, with the situation in the centre of town returning more and more to normal, many people were still living in mostly out the open, in the streets, with their houses still inhabitable. Some 158,600 persons were still without permanent shelter. And, although many were returning home, there were other problems. The prices for food and all general supplies were rising. Malaria cases were also on the rise and one of the major challenges was to clean up the towns, which were full of mud and garbage. There was still no electricity in Gonaive, and the generators they had running were insufficient to cover the needs.
Ms. Byrs recalled that, since 5 August, more than 2.8 million people in the Caribbean region had been affected by the passage of tropical storms and hurricanes – whether it was Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike or Josephine. As for the agriculture sector, some 7.8 thousand hectares of agricultural land had been flooded, with damage to roads, irrigation canals and pumping stations also having a negative impact. Only 2 per cent of the $108 million joint UN Flash Appeal launched last week had been funded so far. This afternoon an information meeting was being held in Geneva with donor States and non-governmental organizations to sensitize them to the situation in Haiti. A briefing note was available at the back of the room.
Georgia
William Spindler of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said UNHCR teams in Georgia had finally succeeded in entering the so-called buffer zone north of the town of Gori over the weekend. The zone, controlled by Russian Military Forces, had been out of reach over the past weeks due to the unstable security situation. The two initial assessment missions visited four villages north of Gori – Karaleti, Tkiavi, Kitsnisi and Dzevera – to obtain an initial snapshot and to assess the humanitarian situation. In the villages closer to Gori, most residents appeared to have returned. In the Karaleti area, on the boundary of the buffer zone, up to 80 per cent of the population had gone back. Deeper inside the buffer zone, the rate of return was considerably lower with less than 10 per cent having returned to Kitsnisi. An atmosphere of fear and insecurity still pervaded in the villages, owing to beatings, looting and arson by marauding militias.
“The destructions of buildings and houses is not as widespread as had been initially feared”, Mr. Spindler continued, noting that the situation “varied from village to village”. In Karaleti, 29 houses out of 600 had been destroyed; whereas, in Kitsnisi, only a few buildings had been burned or bombed. The villagers informed UNHCR that 70 to 80 per cent of this year’s harvest was gone. There were no health services inside the buffer zone, with medical aid and assistance coming from Gori, from where there is only sporadic access to the area. School buildings had remained almost intact, but schools remained closed.
Humanitarian Situation in Somalia
Marcel Izard of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said the ICRC would soon be issuing a news bulletin on the situation in Somalia, which continued to deteriorate and was among the worst in the world in humanitarian terms. ICRC teams had recently reported that displaced families in Somalia were surviving on less than one meal per day and were spending their meagre income on drinking water. For the past four months, the ICRC had been handing out food rations to over half a million Somalis, most of them displaced persons. The ICRC had also relaunched a huge water distribution programme, which had just started and would run through mid-October, during which it would deliver 70 million litres of drinking water to 500 different locations. It was basically the centre and the south of the country that was affected by the armed conflict, and the situation was now aggravated by rising food prices and drought. A media bulletin was available at the back of the room.
Trade and Development Board
Catherine Sibut-Pinote of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said that yesterday the Trade and Development Board begun the work of its fifty-fifth session, which would run from 15 to 26 September 2008 at the Palais des Nations. A press release had been sent out yesterday evening. This morning, the Board was working on the situation of negotiations at the World Trade Organization, with Pascal Lamy addressing UNCTAD members as she spoke. This afternoon discussions would be held on the link between trade and development.
Other
Ms. Sibut-Pinote said that, Monday, 22 September, UNCTAD would devote the day to Cape Verde. In 2007, the Secretary-General of UNCTAD had proposed that all the agencies of the United Nations system coordinate their work in a group that would unite all the heads of agencies that worked in the development sector – some 13 agencies in all, including the United Nations Development Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization, among others. That Group had been working since 2007and Monday they would take a look at achievements in one of the eight pilot countries for their work – Cape Verde, which notably was the second country to make it out of the least developed country category and which had also been accepted as the 153rd member of the World Trade Organization this July.
Ms. Sibut-Pinote also announced a press conference to launch the UNCTAD World Investment Report on transnational corporations and the infrastructure challenge, which would be presented by the Secretary-General of UNCTAD, Supachai Panitchpakdi, as well as the director of the study, on Tuesday, 23 September at 11:30 a.m. in room III.
Mr. Spindler said UNHCR was deeply saddened by the death of eight Sri Lankan refugees who had drowned last Friday while trying to return home by boat from southern India. The group of 13 refugees had each paid 6,000 Indian rupees (about US$ 140) to a local boatman for the crossing. The dead included four women and two children. More than 22,000 Sri Lankans had fled the conflict and sought asylum in India since 2006. Some 73,000 Sri Lankan refugees lived in 117 camps scattered across southern India, mainly in Tamil Nadu.
Yesterday in Beirut, UNHCR had announced that the British head of the UN Mine Action Programme in southern Lebanon and his 990-member team would receive the 2008 Nansen Refugee Award for their work in removing tons of deadly munitions, Mr. Spindler said.
Corinne Perthuis of the International Labour Organization (ILO) said that ILO had now begun two weeks of conferences on maritime issues, with many sailors, captains, shipowners, and governments meeting in Geneva to discuss guidelines on flag-State and port-State inspection on board ships under the Maritime Labour Convention.
Then, tomorrow and Thursday, 17 and 18 September, ILO was hosting a preparatory meeting ahead of the third World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents, which would be held at the end of November in Brazil. The main organizer was ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) International – a Bangkok-based non-governmental organization. Several United Nations agencies, such as the United Nations Children’s Fund and ILO, would participate in the preparatory meeting.
Joost Kooijmans, also of ILO, said that, an ILO Convention recognized that the use of children in prostitution and in the production of pornography was one of the worse forms of child labour. Two years ago, in 2006, ILO member States had adopted a global action plan against the worst forms of child labour which included a political goal to eliminate those forms by 2016. To get there, a number of time-bound measures and national action plans needed to be put in place by all Governments, including against sexual exploitation of children. It was hoped that this meeting would give an extra push to Governments to put those plans in place, but also to ensure that all other actors at the national level, including non-governmental organizations and other civil society actors, were involved in that process of policy setting.
Responding to a query, Mr. Kooijmans said the issue of the vulnerability of children involved in other kinds of child labour, ranging from domestic labour and street vending to commercial sexual exploitation was definitely one of the issues to be addressed at the meeting. Another emphasis would be the need to combat commercial sexual exploitation as part of a broader process that addressed the other vulnerabilities of children and the other conditions they were living under. As for how many children were involved, there was no reliable methodology to give answers at the moment. It was a hidden activity. ILO was still trying to develop methodology and hoped to be able to publish figures by 2010, when it would next publish global child labour statistics. In the areas that ILO did have reliable figures, such as children involved in hazardous labour, the statistics showed an over 20 per cent decrease between 2000 and 2004.
The opening and closing plenaries of the regional preparatory meeting were open to the press, Ms. Perthuis noted. A media advisory on the meeting was available at the back of the room.
Veronique Taveau of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that UNICEF was closely associated with the preparatory process for the World Congress and was just finalizing press kits that would be sent to journalists shortly before the Rio conference. UNICEF would also brief journalists before and after the Congress, in Brazil.
Ms. Taveau also announced the exclusive Geneva launch of a UNICEF report on maternal mortality, part of its series of reports linked to the Millennium Development Goals, which would be held by Peter Salama, Chief of Health at UNICEF and Tessa Wardlaw, the head of Strategic Information at UNICEF, on Friday, 19 September at 11.15 a.m. in Room III. A PDF copy of the report, under strict embargo until Friday, would be sent to journalists this afternoon. Hardcopies would be available in French, English and Spanish on Friday.
Ms. Chaib noted that this Thursday, 18 September, WHO was holding a press conference at 10 a.m. to launch its Global Malaria Report, 2008. Speaking would be WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, Awa Coll-Seck, the Executive Director of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, among others. Copies of the report in English were available at the back of the room, subject to a strict embargo till Thursday, 10 a.m. Geneva time. A media advisory had also been sent, which included links for electronic copies of the report in all the six official languages.
Gaëlle Sévenier of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that the Secretary-General of WMO and the Secretary-General of the International Organization for Standardization signed a memorandum of agreement today to reinforce the development of international standards for products and services linked to meteorology, hydrology and climatology.
Today, 16 September, WMO was celebrating the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer, Ms. Sévenier said. Speaking on this occasion, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed his hope that the results of the Montreal Protocol – signed on 7 September 1987 – would mobilize Governments to address a number of ecological challenges and not just during periods of prosperity. The WMO estimated that the ozone hole would not be as large in 2008 as in 2006, but would nevertheless be larger than that in 2007. A press release was available at the back of the room.
Mr. Izard said that since Monday, in Montreux, an intergovernmental expert meeting was being held by 15 States, hosted by the Swiss Government and ICRC, at which experts were discussing how to regulate private military and security companies that worked for States in situations of armed conflict. The meeting would end tomorrow and a press briefing would be held at 11 a.m. It was expected that experts would issue a so-called Montreux Document, the first time that an international document would spell out in detail what States’ and private military and security companies’ legal responsibilities were in conflict situations.
Responding to questions, Mr. Izard said that up to 17 countries had already expressed their commitment to be bound by such guidelines. In response to a question, he said participants at the conference would include representatives of the United States, Iraq, the United Kingdom and Afghanistan.