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 on the Conference on Disarmament, the Secretary-General travelling to Nigeria to participate in an African Union Summit, Geneva activities and human rights and other issues. Spokespersons for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development participated in the briefing.

Conference on Disarmament

The Director said that the Conference on Disarmament had yesterday held the first plenary of its 2005 session. In his message to the Conference, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that disarmament was critical for conflict prevention, peace building and the realization of the Millennium Development Goals. The message was delivered by Sergei Ordzhonikidze, Under-Secretary-General and Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva. Copies of the Secretary-General's statement were in the press room, as were copies of the press release on the statements of the various other speakers who addressed the plenary. The press release was available in English and in French.

Mrs. Heuzé said that in an interview yesterday, Mr. Ordzhonikidze, who is also the Secretary-General of the Conference on Disarmament, said that a break in the impasse in the Conference would help build confidence among States and improve international relations and the general global political atmosphere. Mr. Ordzhonikidze noted that it was estimated that $ 839 billion were spent on strategic arms annually which was intolerable in a world with millions of people living on one or two dollars a day. He said these billions of dollars spent on strategic arms could be better used in the fight against poverty and HIV/AIDS. Copies of the interview with Mr. Ordzhonikidze were available in English.

Secretary-General to Attend African Union Summit

The Director said the Secretary-General was on his way to Nigeria where he would participate in the African Union Summit. The Summit's agenda mainly concerned the many conflicts in the African continent which were a major concern to the United Nations. Under-Secretary-General Jan Egeland, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told the Security Council at a meeting on humanitarian challenges in Africa yesterday that nearly four-fifths of the recent United Nations humanitarian appeals had addressed African problems, but the response had been slow to nearly non-existent. Copies of Mr. Egeland's statement were available in the press room in English and in French. Mr. Egeland said that the international community should respond to the victims of protracted armed conflicts in Africa by trying its hardest, being innovative and quickly building on the response in the last four weeks to the tsunami disaster.

In a related development, the Director reminded journalists that the report of the commission of inquiry on whether acts of genocide had occurred in Darfur, Sudan would be released on Tuesday, 1 February. Information on reports that about 100 people were killed or injured when Sudanese Government airplanes recently bombed a village in the northern section of the country's war-scarred Darfur region was also available.

Mrs. Heuzé said that the report of a Group of Experts whose members were probing violations of the arms embargo imposed by the Security Council on the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been issued yesterday in New York. The Group of Experts had been created pursuant to Security Council resolution 1533 (2004). The report is still being considered by the DRC Sanctions Committee in advance of its consideration by the Security Council.

Geneva Activities

The Director said the Committee on the Rights of the Child was today concluding its three-week winter session during which it had considered the situation of children in Sweden, Albania, Luxembourg, Austria, Belize, the Bahamas, Iran, Nigeria, Togo and Bolivia. The Spokesperson for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights had said that he had not been able to set up a press briefing with members of the Committee because they were still meeting this morning to discuss concluding observations and recommendations on the reports considered during the session. Journalists who were interested in setting up an interview with the Chairperson of the Committee should contact her.

The Governing Council of the United Nations Compensation Commission had yesterday elected Greece as the President, and Japan as the new Vice-President of the Governing Council. The Permanent Representative of Greece, Ambassador Tassos Kriekoukis would preside over future sessions of the Governing Council.

The Working Group on governance of the Internet would be held from 14 to 16 February in Room XVIII and XX at the Palais des Nations. Also, the Second Preparatory Meeting for the second part of the World Summit on the Information Society would be held from 17 to 25 February in the Assembly Hall. The first part of WSIS had been held in Geneva in 2003 and the second part would be held in Tunisia in November 2005.

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination would hold its sixty-sixth session from 21 February to 11 March at the Palais Wilson. The Committee would consider reports presented by the Lao People's Democratic Republic, France, Luxembourg, Nigeria, Australia, Ireland, Bahrain and Azerbaijan

Human Rights

José Luis Díaz, Spokesperson for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that High Commissioner Louise Arbour arrived in Kabul this morning. She was in Afghanistan for a visit that was meant to lend support to Afghan efforts to deal with past human rights abuses. She would be participating tomorrow in the launch of a major report by the national Afghan Human Rights Commission which would cast a strategy for dealing with human rights abuses that had taken place in Afghanistan since just before the Soviet invasion of that country. The Office had contributed to the national Afghan effort to come up with a transitional justice strategy by preparing a compilation of documentation on human rights violations that cover the period from 27 April 1978 to the inauguration of the interim Afghan Government in December 2001. Mrs. Arbour would be handing the compilation over to the National Commission tomorrow at that ceremony. It would also be handed to the Afghan authorities. Mrs. Arbour would return to Geneva over the weekend and would be in the Office next week.

Mr. Díaz said the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Yakin Erturk, would be visiting Iran. Ms. Erturk would be arriving in Tehran tomorrow and she would stay there until 6 February. The Special Rapporteur would be gathering first-hand information on violence against women in Iran. She would be meeting with representatives of the Government as well as non-governmental organizations, including women's organizations, and with individuals engaged in human rights work. She would also meet with UN officials in Iran. Ms. Erturk would be giving an oral report on the visit to the upcoming session of the Commission on Human Rights and would present the full report to the sixty-second session of the Commission next year.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child was today ending its session, he went on. The concluding observations would be issued shortly and they were embargoed until noon Geneva time. One of the reports the Committee had reviewed was that of Iran, and one of the issues raised during the consideration was that execution of minors under 18 had continued, including one such execution on the day (20 January) the Committee examined a report from that country, a fact the Committee deplored. In its observations on a country in another part of the world, namely Sweden, the Committee recommended that the State party strengthen measures to ensure that family reunification procedures for recognized refugees were dealt with in a positive, fair, humane and expeditious manner.

Asked what a "transitional justice strategy" meant, Mr. Díaz said it meant how a country which had come through a period of armed conflict and serious human rights violations proposed to deal with those violations and how it proposed to come to terms with its past; how to deal with persons responsible for these human rights abuses to ensure that there was no impunity. That could take different forms. In some countries, that was done through truth and reconciliation commissions, for example. Other countries had handled it through special courts, or mixed national and international courts, as has been proposed in Cambodia.

In response to a follow-up question, Mr. Díaz noted that the compilation was of known human rights violations. The focus of the High Commissioner's visit with regard to Afghanistan was to support national efforts, not to bring a ready-made strategy prepared by the Office.

In response to a question on the reported recent Government bombing which killed more than 100 persons, Mr. Díaz said that the Office had seen the reports quoting the UN Advance Mission in Sudan, which had sent a team to the area. The Office's own monitors were also trying to get more information on this incident.

A journalist said a non-governmental organization had sent the Office a report on a hunger strike in a Saudi Arabian prison, and asked for a comment. Mr. Díaz said he had not seen the report. He would check and get back to the journalist.

Tsunami Relief Efforts

Jennifer Pagonis of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees said that UNHCR was still finding pockets of people along the west coast of Indonesia who had had very little assistance and were still in the emergency phase so it was using the Swiss helicopters to shuttle shelter materials from its operational base in Banda Aceh to these areas. UNHCR's ongoing assessment missions would continue. In Sri Lanka, UNHCR was continuing its relief operations and had now distributed aid to around 150,000 tsunami displaced persons.

Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that the joint UNEP/OCHA environmental unit, which was part of OCHA's Emergency Branch Services, had carried out assessment missions in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Maldives on the environmental consequences of the tsunami. The resulting report on the situation in the Maldives had already been presented at the Kobe meeting, and the reports on the situation in Sri Lanka and Indonesia would be presented in Geneva at the end of next week. She said a briefing would be held with an expert on the reports.

Ms. Byrs said that the Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Margareta Wahlstrom, who was also the Special Coordinator for the Tsunami-affected Communities, would be in Geneva on 4 February and she would try to organize a briefing with her.

Jean Philippe Chauzy of the International Organization for Migration said IOM Director-General Brunson McKinley was arriving late today in Colombo on the first leg of a visit to tsunami-affected areas. He would leave Sri Lanka on 2 February for Indonesia where he would travel to Banda Aceh, the area worst hit by the disaster. The Director-General would end his visit in Japan. Work on the IOM shelter provisions in Sri Lanka was progressing. And in Indonesia, IOM Banda Aceh yesterday welcomed the deployment of 950 members of the Japanese Self Defence Force, providing minibuses to transport them after they were brought ashore by a hovercraft on a remote beach.

Other

Catherine Sibut-Pinot of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said available at the back of the room were copies of UNCTAD's Handbook of Statistics 2004 and an accompanying press release. The figures for 2004 were calculated according to the first three trimesters of 2004.

Jennifer Pagonis of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees said High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers was scheduled to start a six-day four-nation mission to West Africa on Sunday 30 January to discuss refugee issues. He would start his mission in Guinea, and then would travel to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire and would return to Geneva on 5 February. Mr. Lubbers was scheduled to meet with Heads of State, top Government and UN officials in the region, refugees, returnees, UNHCR's implementing partners and staff.

Jean Philippe Chauzy of the International Organization for Migration said that the first votes in Iraq's Transitional National Assembly elections had been cast in Australia at 0700 local time and out-of-country voting was now in full swing in most of the14 countries where it was taking place. More than 280,000 expatriate Iraqis had registered to vote in the 14 countries and they had from 28 to 30 January to cast their ballots.


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