REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE

Elena Ponomareva-Piquier, Chief of the Press and External Relations Section of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing which was attended by Spokespersons for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Organization for Migration, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Programme.

Ms. Ponomareva-Piquier reminded journalists that the briefing on Friday, 23 December, would be the last briefing for 2005. The first briefing in 2006 would be held on Friday, 6 January.

Secretary-General Receives 2005 Prize for Global Leadership and the Environment

Ms. Ponomareva-Piquier said Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been awarded the 2005 Prize for Global Leadership and the Environment that is conferred by the Zayed Prize International Jury. In their citation, the jury for that prize said that “one person has done more than most to catalyze political and public opinion to an understanding that the environment is a fundamental pillar of sustainable development. That person is Mr. Kofi Annan.”

Secretary-General Relieved WTO Meeting did not End in Failure

Ms. Ponomareva-Piquier said the Secretary-General was relieved that the World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong did not end in failure, as had been widely predicted. Mr. Annan recognized the effort made by the negotiators, and especially by the WTO Director-General, Pascal Lamy, to keep the Doha Round on track; and congratulated those who negotiated on behalf of the developing countries, particularly the least developed, on their success in working together and securing limited gains. He said these gains, if fully implemented, should bring improved opportunities for some of the world’s poorest people to trade their way out of poverty.

The text of the Secretary-General’s message was available in the press room.

UN Humanitarian Chief Appeals for Better Security in Darfur

Ms. Ponomareva-Piquier said Jan Egeland, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator, yesterday told the Security Council that unless measures taken by the Security Council had a real impact on the ground, the wound in Darfur would continue to bleed. He appealed for an expanded and more effective security presence on the ground as soon as possible. Mr. Egeland also spoke about the impact of the crisis in Darfur on Chad, and the regional crisis caused by the activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, Sudan and most recently the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He also spoke about the situation in Zimbabwe, from which he just returned.

The statement of Mr. Egeland to the Security Council was available in the press room.

UN Economic Commission for Africa Urges Creation of New Jobs to Fight Unemployment and Poverty

The UN Economic Commission for Africa has noted in its annual Economic report on Africa 2005 that despite strong economic growth from higher prices for oil and other commodities, high unemployment remained endemic in Africa and poverty will not be arrested until millions of new jobs are created each year. The report said the creation of decent jobs that could be performed by poor people was the single most effective way to reduce poverty in Africa. It said some 8 million jobs must be created each year to satisfy the growing number of job seekers.

The report, “Meeting the Challenges of Unemployment and Poverty in Africa,” said despite higher growth, average unemployment rates had remained at around 10 per cent since 1995, the second highest in the world after the Middle East.
The most visible consequence of such high unemployment was growing poverty in Africa. Copies of the report were available in the press room.

Human Rights

José Luis Díaz, Spokesperson of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said journalists had received yesterday a statement by the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Miloon Kothari, and the Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on the human rights of internally displaced persons, Dr. Walter Kälin, on the anniversary of the tsunami. The experts were concerned that a year later, reconstruction efforts were plagued by serious delays and had not been awarded the priority they so urgently warranted. Tsunami survivors continued to suffer from inequities in aid distribution and sub-standard housing resulting from political dynamics, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and caste affiliation.

Mr. Díaz said consultations were still ongoing in New York among delegations regarding the new Human Rights Council. They were still not close to final agreement on a draft resolution that would then be submitted to the General Assembly which would establish the Council. What seemed clear now was that there would be one more session of the Commission on Human Rights in the spring of 2006, which would probably be the last one. Consultations were aiming to reach agreement on a draft resolution which would spell all this out by the end of the year. If not, consultations would continue in January.

Asked to be more specific about why the two independent experts were upset about the aid to the tsunami victims, Mr. Díaz said in the statement, the experts said for the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people across several countries, relief and rehabilitation efforts, regrettably, continued to prove inadequate and large numbers of survivors remained forced to live in sub-standard conditions that failed to meet criteria for adequate housing and living conditions dictated by international human rights standards. Among other things, the experts said the presence of military forces in some camps where tsunami survivors were living, as well as the lack of privacy in temporary shelters, had raised serious concerns regarding women’s physical safety, and had increased their vulnerability to physical and sexual violence, illustrating once again the close nexus between violence against women and the lack of adequate housing. They were also concerned that the forced relocation of certain groups of people further exposed them to vulnerability. This included Dalit communities in India, Burmese migrants in Thailand, and Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka.

A journalist asked why there was no agreement yet on the Human Rights Council. In response, Mr. Díaz said he could not give a detailed account of the situation at the moment, as consultations were ongoing and that the one text that there was was very fluid.

In response to a question on the prevalence of racism around the world and what the UN was doing about it, Mr. Díaz said that as the journalist knew there was a special rapporteur on the issue, Doudou Diene. Every year, he presented a report to the Commission on Human Rights concerning the situation round the world and focusing on a number of countries. At the Office, there was also an anti-discrimination section set up after the World Conference against Racism which was held in 2001 in Durban, South Africa. There was also the intergovernmental working group of experts on implementation of the outcome of the Durban conference. [There is also the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination]. So there were a number of mechanisms which followed the issue of racism.

A journalist asked if a response to the criticism of the aid efforts to the tsunami victims was expected, especially since Mr. Egeland had promised transparency in all humanitarian operations. Mr. Díaz said the statement was issued yesterday evening, and he did not know if there would be a response. Respoding to a further question, he said the experts probably were expecting some response to their expression of concern.

Pakistan

Jemini Pandya of the International Organization for Migration said the cold nights across Pakistan-administered Kashmir and North Western Frontier Province were prompting many people unused to living in tents to light candles and other fires. To raise awareness and prevent fire accidents, the IOM-coordinated Emergency Shelter Cluster was supplementing information already handed out by aid agencies in the field. There had already been several cases of tent fires across the region. Even though IOM's operation 'Winter Race' had been successful in providing 10,000 shelters for people living above 5,000 feet, there were still many families that required assistance.

Sudan

Jennifer Pagonis of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees said the first groups of refugees who went home to South Sudan with UNHCR’s help over the weekend should be arriving in their home villages today – the first of about 60,000 refugees which the agency planned to bring home in the next five months as its organized repatriation got underway. All the returnees were given household goods to help them re-establish their lives and the World Food Programme had distributed food rations. UNHCR was not promoting the return of refugees yet, but it was helping refugees return home if they asked for help. An estimated 75,000 refugees had demonstrated their faith in the future of South Sudan by coming home on their own so far this year, mainly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Other

Jemini Pandya of the International Organization for Migration said in Indonesia, nearly 200 homeless tsunami-survivors traded the tents where they had lived for the past 11 months for IOM shelters close to their village of origin today, in the first of several such move-in dates that would see more than 330 new homes occupied by the end of the year. IOM had provided new homes for an estimated 6,500 tsunami-affected people in locations around the province. In Costa Rica, a new IOM video aimed at combating human trafficking would be aired by more than 17 international television networks. The video, expected to reach about 164 million people, would serve to raise awareness amongst the general population and alert hundreds of thousands of potential victims of trafficking in Central America, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

Simon Pluess of the World Food Programme said Liberian refugees in Guinea would have to go through renewed ration cuts from 1,800 kilocalories to 1, 600 kilocalories from 1 January 2006. This was because WFP’s West Africa coastal operation, which also included Liberia and Sierra Leone, was only just over 50 per cent funded and the forecast for 2006 was far from encouraging. The level of interest of the international community in this corner of the world was not high at all. The repatriation of Liberian refugees had resumed after the second round of elections in Liberia, but at a much lower pace than expected. There were still some 56,000 Liberian and Ivorian refugees in camps in Guinea who were being fed by WFP. Lack of funding had forced WFP to cut rations for refugees in Guinea several times since August 2004. The 1,800 kilocalories they were getting now were just 87 per cent of what they should eat to stay health.

Jennifer Pagonis of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees said the return home yesterday of a group of 42 Angolan refuges from Botswana marked the end of UNHCR’s three-year programme of organized convoys to Angola, under a voluntary repatriation scheme that had helped hundreds of thousands of refugees return home. Since the Angolan organized programme started in 2003, more than 123,000 Angolan refugees had gone home with the help of UNHCR.

Ms. Pagonis said UNHCR was deeply saddened by the death of a Somali man and injuries suffered by another five Somali demonstrators and four Yemeni policemen following an incident on Saturday outside its office in Sanaa, where police dispersed an increasingly aggressive crowd that had been there since 13 November despite ongoing efforts to reach a solution. In Egypt, despite an agreement reached on Saturday between the leaders of the Sudanese demonstrators and UNHCR, a group of some 1,500 Sudanese were continuing a protest in Mostafa Mahmoud park in Cairo. The Sudanese had been gathered in the park since September 29 to protest living conditions and to demand resettlement to third countries.