REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE

Corinne Momal-Vanian, Director of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing which was also attended by Spokespersons for the World Health Organization, the World Meteorological Organizations, the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations Refugee Agency and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Director-General’s Agenda

Ms. Momal-Vanian said the Director-General of UNOG, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, would be meeting this week with the Secretary-General of the OSCE, Lamberto Zannier, on 19 January. They would both address an event organized by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy to examine the changing nature of partnerships among international and regional organizations in confronting contemporary global and regional security challenges.

Geneva Activities

Ms. Momal-Vanian said the Committee on the Rights of the Child started its fifty-ninth session on 16 January at the Palais Wilson. This morning, the Committee was starting to consider the periodic reports of Azerbaijan under the Convention and its Optional Protocols. It would take up the report of Democratic Republic of the Congo under the Optional Protocol on children and armed conflict on 18 January in the afternoon. On 19 January, the Committee would consider the reports of Myanmar and on 20 January, it would review the reports of Madagascar.

Ms. Momal-Vanian said there were three press conferences this week. Today at noon in Room III, there would be a presentation of the World Economic Situation and Prospects 2012 published by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (Embargoed until 17/01/2012 at 12.00 noon Central European Time (CET) / Geneva time). The speakers were Alfredo Calcagno, Head, Macro-Economic and Development Policies Branch, Division on Globalization and Development Strategies, UNCTAD and Robert C. Shelburne - United Nations Economic Commission for Europe - Senior Economic Affairs Officer - Office of the Executive Secretary.

There was another press conference at 2:30 p.m. in press room one on 18 January on
Disaster Trends 2011. Speaking would be Helena Molin-Valdes, interim Director, UNISDR; and Debarati Guha-Sapir, Director, Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters.

On 19 January at noon in Room III, there would be a press conference on the humanitarian situation in Somalia. Speaking would be Mark Bowden, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia.

Ms. Momal-Vanian said journalists had requested a briefing by UNRWA and she had contacted the colleagues there and they were ready to talk to the press at any point.

United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Human Trafficking

Ms. Momal-Vanian said available at the back of the room was documentation on the Blue Heart Campaign organized by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which was based in Vienna. The campaign sought to raise attention regarding the issue of human trafficking and gather money for the United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking. An event would be held tonight in Geneva in the presence Yuri Fedotov, the Executive Director of UNODC, who was also the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna, to launch a watch to benefit the campaign. The event would be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. tonight at the Hotel des Bergues in Geneva.

If any journalists had questions on the campaign, they could send them to Preeta Banjerree at the United Nations Office at Vienna, but if they wished to request interviews with Mr. Fedotov, they could contact Alessandra Vellucci, Chief of the Press and External Relations Section.

World Health Organization Executive Board

Fadéla Chaib of the World Health Organization (WHO) said today was the second day of the WHO Executive Board. This morning the Board took up the nomination for the post of the Director-General of WHO in private. Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO and the only candidate for the post, would address the Board this morning. This would be followed by the appointment of the Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, Ala Alwan, who would take up his post in Cairo on 1 February. The nomination for the post of the Director-General of WHO would be officially announced at a public meeting tomorrow and would be taken up by the World Health Assembly in May.

This afternoon, the Executive Board would continue to discuss technical and health matters and would take up the issue of early marriages, adolescent and young pregnancies. Three experts were available to address any questions by journalists on this issue.

World Radiocommunication Assembly and the World Radiocommunication Conference

Sanjay Acharya of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said the World Radiocommunication Conference would open next week on 23 January and would run until 17 February. The Radio Communication Assembly had opened yesterday at the Geneva International Conference Centre and would be in session until 20 January. The Assembly was responsible for setting the future programmes on the technical issues in the field of telecommunications and approving world-wide radio communication standards or ITU-R recommendations. A topic which had generated a lot of attention was the leap second issue.

Francois Rancy, Director of the Radiocommunication Bureau, said they would be addressing all the allocations which were used by radio communication services during the Conference starting next week. Among the radio communication services were the meteorological services, which were generally included in what they called scientific services. There were other radio communication services which were more familiar like the GPS, broadcasting of television and sound and cell phones. Radio communication services were used by everyone every day and there was a need to organize that, otherwise, there would be interference and nothing would work. A recommendation on the leap second issue concerning universal time on whether or not to maintain the leap second had to be decided upon by the Radio Communication Assembly.

Vincent Meens, Chairman of the ITU-R Study Group Seven, said the question of maintaining or removing "the leap second", which allowed intermittent adjustments between earth time and the atomic time, mattered because it was impossible to predict more than two months in advance when the adjustment would be made. A leap second then had to be inserted into all the radiocommunication systems and computer systems. This created a problem, because it needed to be done manually, and there was always a risk for the systems to be in error so they had to be tested. For instance, because adjustments, when they occurred, took place on 30 June or 31 December, the European Space Agency could never schedule rocket launches on those dates. If the leap second was done away with, this problem would be removed. However, there would be a deviation between the earth time and the atomic time, in the order of about 90 seconds per century. Some countries strongly supported the change, while others opposed it. It was nevertheless hoped that a consensus decision could be taken.

Vadim Nozdrin, Counsellor, ITU-R Study Group, said to this point they had only received 16 responses from Member States to the question of whether or not to keep the leap second. The position of the other Member States was not yet known.

Claire Nullis of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said that WMO had made a submission to the World Radiocommunication Conference. In the submission, WMO stressed that weather forecasts, disaster warnings and climate monitoring were all very dependent on radio frequency bands, and these bands were used around the clock by meteorological organizations. WMO was worried that increasing pressure on the use of radio spectrum from wireless technology and other applications could hamper observations and efforts to understand and predict climate change. WMO was urging the Conference to uphold previous commitments to make available and protect these invaluable radio frequency bands.

UN Refugee Agency

Adrian Edwards of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said that on 15 January, 33 unaccompanied children departed from Tunisia’s Shousha refugee camp to Norway as part of their resettlement process. The children were among 90 who arrived unaccompanied from Libya during 2011. Some were already without parents when they first arrived in Libya; others lost their parents or became separated from them subsequently. Most were from Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, or Eritrea. Shousha was home to 3,400 refugees. Unaccompanied children among them had relied on help from friends and relatives, as well as local and international aid workers. In total, 39 of these 90 children had now been resettled - most to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Life at Shousha camp remained difficult, with windswept conditions and bitter cold. UNHCR and its partners hoped that solutions could quickly be found for the unaccompanied children who remained there - as well as for the other refugees who await solutions. UNHCR considered resettlement to be the only viable option for the majority of recognized refugees who fled Libya to Tunisia and Egypt.

UNHCR was calling on resettlement countries to expedite decisions on resettlement submissions. Currently only one out of five refugees submitted had been accepted, and only one out of six, or 731 refugees, had actually departed.

Question on Syria

Asked about a formal request that had been made for help from the Arab League for the Office of the High Commissioner to train the observers being sent to Syria, Mr. Colville said the Office had been discussing with the League of Arab States the possibility to provide training for the second group of observers. The Office had anticipated that the trainers would leave yesterday from Geneva to Cairo, but at the weekend the League of Arab States requested that they put this issue on hold for the moment until a key discussion on what happened next took place on 19 January.