REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE

Elena Ponomareva-Piquier, Head of the Press and External Relations Section of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing which also heard from Spokespersons for the United Nations Children’s Fund, the UN Refugee Agency, the International Telecommunications Union and the International Organization for Migration.

Secretary-General’s Press Conference

Ms. Ponomareva-Piquier said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday gave a press conference at Headquarters to report about his first 10 days in office. He noted that he had met with the staff of the Organization, including representatives from all major duty stations around the world. He had also made five major appointments, including the post of Deputy Secretary-General and Chef de Cabinet. The Secretary-General said that inside the United Nations, he would work on three broad fronts: to strive to restore trust, both between Member States and Secretariat, and between senior management and staff; to seek to strengthen institutional capacity, and to ensure that the Secretariat was structured in a way that allowed it to respond effectively to the demands placed on the Organization; and to strive to change the working culture of the Organization itself.

On peace and security, the Secretary-General said that Africa would be the focus of many of his priorities, and his first major trip would reflect that focus. At the end of the month, he would attend the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, where Darfur and Somalia would be at the top of the agenda. He would also go to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Another priority would be to inject new momentum into the search for peace and stability in the Middle East. On his way to Africa, the Secretary-General said he would attend the Lebanon reconstruction conference in Paris. On Israel-Palestine, he said he was pushing for a Quartet meeting to take place as soon as possible. The Secretary-General stressed that the world must step up work to reach the Millennium Development Goals by the target date of 2015. He also underlined the importance of doing far better in the mission to halt climate change.

The transcript of the Secretary-General’s press conference was available in the press room.

Committee on the Rights of the Child

Ms. Ponomareva-Piquier said the forty-fourth session of the Committee on the Rights of the Child will open on Monday, 15 January at the Palais Wilson during which it will consider reports from Kenya, Honduras, the Marshal Islands, Suriname, Malaysia and Chile under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Committee will also review reports from Costa Rica and Kyrgyzstan under the Optional Protocols to the Convention on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, and on children in armed conflict. The background press release was available in English and in French and the Information Service as usual would produce a press release at the end of the consideration of each country report.

Somalia

Damien Personnaz of the United Nations Children’s Fund said UNICEF and Save the Children UK today underlined that peace and security were urgently needed in Somalia to end the suffering of thousands of Somali children affected by the recent conflict. In a joint statement, UNICEF and Save the Children UK said they had received information that some children had been randomly shot in the streets, while others risked being recruited to fight by re-emerging warlords. Mr. Personnaz underlined that Somalia and the United States were the only two countries which had not acceded to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. A media release with more information was available in the press room.

Ron Redmond of the UN Refugee Agency said UNHCR was airlifting relief supplies and had dispatched two emergency teams -- to Somalia and Ethiopia -- to verify reports of new displacement in north-east Somalia and to check reports of a possible influx of Somali refugees into eastern Ethiopia. Following the fighting in Mogadishu in late December that led to the arrival in the Somali capital of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), UNHCR had received reports of up to 10,000 newly displaced Somalis in Galkayo town. They joined an estimated 15,000 internally displaced people (IDP) who were already in 14 established settlements in and around the town. The 15,000 IDPs were displaced prior to the current round of conflict and were part of an overall IDP population in the border region of Puntland and Central Somalia of some 80,000. In all of Somalia, there were more than 400,000 internally displaced people, most of them displaced in earlier conflicts and by drought in South and Central Somalia. UNHCR remained extremely worried about the humanitarian situation inside Somalia.

Other

Damien Personnaz of the United Nations Children’s Fund said available at the back of the room was a report on AIDS and children which took stock of developments since UNICEF launched its Unite for Children, Unite against AIDS campaign. The report was embargoed until 11 GMT on 16 January 2007.

Sanjay Acharya of the International Telecommunications Union reminded journalists that the new Secretary-General of ITU, Hamadoun Touré, would be speaking to them at 11:30 a.m. today.

Jean-Philippe Chauzy said a new IOM study has revealed that more than 1.5 million Peruvians have left the country in the past 15 years. This first official study on the Peruvian diaspora confirmed that 1,665,850 Peruvians left the country between 1990 and 2005 and had not returned.