REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE

Marie Heuzé, the Director of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing which was addressed by Spokespersons for the World Meteorological Organization, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development and the International Organization for Migration.

Report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ms. Heuzé said the Secretary-General’s message to the Paris Conference for Global Ecological Governance was available at the back of the room. In his message, the Secretary-General said the whole world was witnessing the deterioration in the environment. Climate changes were the clearest example. He said this issue would be one of his main priorities as Secretary-General of the United Nations. But it was not the only threat. Shortages of water, erosion of land and loss of biodiversity were other threats on the horizon. All these issues would compromise the progress accomplished by humanity over dozens of years, affect the fight against poverty and endanger peace and security. The problem of climate change ignored borders and no country had the means to fight to protect alone the world’s environment. Only concerted and coordinated international action would do, and the United Nations was naturally best placed to take up action on this issue.

The Secretary-General said he was strongly committed to ensuring that the United Nations helped the international community to make the transition to sustainable development. The United Nations Environment Programme, the UN’s focal point on this issue, had embarked on wide-ranging reforms to ensure it was equal to this challenge. Other parts of the United Nations family were mobilizing and the Secretary-General said he planned to strengthen this work further.

Ms. Heuzé said the executive summary of the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would soon be on the IPCC website, and the press conference would be webcast as well. The report itself would only be available in May.

Mark Oliver of the World Meteorological Organization said that they were working to get the executive summary of the IPCC report on line as soon as possible. Available at the back of the room was a press release on the report and interested journalists could call his colleagues listed in the release for interviews or further information.

Secretary-General to Attend Quartet Meeting in Washington

Ms. Heuzé said the Secretary-General would today be participating in a meeting of the principals of the Middle East Quartet in Washington. The other senior participants at that meeting would be US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, European Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, representing the Presidency of the European Union. The Secretary-General was looking forward to his first Quartet meeting and hoped that the Quartet would seriously engage with the key issues that had a direct impact on the situation on the ground, going beyond mere statements.
Secretary-General’s Activities in the Hague

The Secretary-General was in the Netherlands yesterday where he visited the senior officials of all the major tribunals based in The Hague: the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Following a visit to the last of those bodies, he spoke to the press to express his appreciation for the Tribunal’s work and to urge the Bosnian Serb war crime fugitives Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to appear before the court, for their own interest as well as for the benefit of international peace and security. Later, he met with Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, and had a working luncheon with the Prime Minister, as well as with the Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Defense and Development Cooperation.

Deputy Secretary-General Begins Work

Ms. Heuzé said Asha-Rose Migiro, the Deputy Secretary-General, began her work at UN Headquarters yesterday. Over the course of yesterday and today, she was visiting various UN departments, as well as the offices of some funds and programmes, to receive briefings and to hear from officials throughout the system. A ceremony was expected to take place in which the Deputy Secretary-General signed a declaration sometime next week. She would formally start her duties next week

Geneva Activities

Ms. Heuzé said the Committee on the Rights of the Child was today concluding its forty-fourth session and would release its concluding observations and recommendations on the reports of Kenya, Mali, Honduras, Suriname, Malaysia and Chile on how they implement the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Committee would also issue its conclusions on the initial reports of Costa Rica and Kyrgyzstan on the Optional Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on children and armed conflict and on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. Its comments on the technical review it held on the report of the Marshal Islands in the absence of a delegation would also be released.

The Conference on Disarmament yesterday heard a statement from Switzerland at its formal plenary. The next public plenary will be held at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, 6 February.

New Documents

Ms. Heuzé said the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari would be travelling to both Belgrade and Pristina today to present his proposal on Kosovo. He would take his proposal to the Security Council later this month. His proposal as well as relevant fact sheets would be posted today at www.unosek.org.

The latest report to the Secretary-General on Sudan was also available in the Documentation Centre.

Human Rights

José Luis Díaz of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said High Commissioner Louise Arbour was this morning expressing concern that the national stability plan passed by Afghanistan’s lower house of Parliament, the “Wolesi Jirga”, on 31 January, could lead to past serious human rights violations going unpunished.
According to the plan, “all opponents who fought each other for different reasons in the past two and a half decades should be attracted to the national reconciliation process and should forgive each other and they should not be dealt with through legal and judicial channels”. The High Commissioner said the plan “will undermine the process towards securing long term peace through re-establishing the rule of law in Afghanistan”. The High Commissioner recalled that the President of Afghanistan had publicly launched the Action Plan on Peace, Reconciliation and Justice on 10 December 2006 with the objective, among others, of ending impunity and ensuring that there would be no amnesty for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other gross human rights violations and that there would be the establishment of fair and effective justice procedures, in accordance with the principles of Islam, international law and transitional justice, to deal with such cases. The High Commissioner called for the Government to vigorously continue implementing the Action Plan to meet the benchmark set in the Afghanistan Compact. The statement would be issued shortly.

Asked if the High Commissioner was attending or was being represented at an ongoing meeting in Paris on capital punishment, Mr. Díaz said the Office was not represented at that meeting. He recalled the known position of the Office and the High Commissioner against the death penalty. She had made appeals on the issue of capital punishment concerning the recent executions in Iraq.

Responding to a question on whether the High Commissioner could give a press conference soon, Mr. Díaz said she was travelling to Paris, France next week, and then to Canada. From there she would go to Panama, where she would sign an agreement on the opening of a regional office, and then on to Bolivia. He would see whether the High Commissioner could address the press upon her return to Geneva from that trip.

Mr. Díaz said the meeting which among things discussed rational profiling was concluding its work later this afternoon and its recommendations would be available later in the day.

Other

Ruth Landy of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) said three BBC World documentaries would feature on the four Sundays of February to examine the science of modern vaccines and what it took to deliver them to some of the poorest people in the world, as well as the challenges ahead. A press release was available with more details. Another press release was available related to the press conference held last week at Davos at which it was announced that thanks to the GAVI Alliance, immunisation rates had hit record highs in poor countries. The data showed that GAVI immunisation programmes in 2006 prevented 600,000 future deaths.

Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said concerning the floods in Jakarta, heavy rains since 29 January had caused the Ciliwung River to overflow. The heavy rains were expected to continue and the Governor of Jakarta was warning the population that the situation would deteriorate further. So far, 10,300 persons were affected in and around Jakarta and some 2,406 houses were inundated with 30-150 centimetres of water. Local authorities continued to provide emergency shelters, health clinics, mobile latrines and pubic kitchens. More details were available in a floods Jakarta update.

Ms. Byrs said she wanted to inform journalists that Switzerland had made a donation to the Central Emergency Response Fund of 10 million Swiss francs.

In conclusion, Ms. Byrs reminded journalists of the press conference on the Central African Republic which would start in press room 1 shortly.

Damien Personnaz of the United Nations Children’s Fund said available was a press release on the Central African Republic which was often considered as Africa’s most forgotten nations. The country was on the verge of a widespread humanitarian crisis as a decade-long armed conflict threatened to spread throughout the country. There was a wealth of information in the release. Next week, Mia Farrow, who was a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, would visit the Central African Republic for three or four days.

Ron Redmond of the UN Refugee Agency said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres was leaving today on a weeklong mission to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Syria aimed at strengthening cooperation between UNHCR and partners in the four countries and assessing UNHCR’s programmes for hundreds of thousands of displaced Iraqis in the region. UNHCR had just issued a $60 million appeal to fund its work for Iraqis displaced inside their country, for non-Iraqi refugees in Iraq, and for Iraqis and others who had fled to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey and Iran. This would be his first visit to the Gulf region since he assumed office in June 2005. The High Commissioner was extremely concerned about the continuing violence and displacement in Iraq and the impact it was having on the region. UNHCR and its partners estimated that out of a total population of 26 million, some 1.8 million Iraqis were currently displaced internally, while up to 2 million others had fled to nearby countries and further afield.

Mr. Redmond said in Chad, rampant insecurity continued to wreak havoc on humanitarian activities across the east of the country, disrupting access to refugees and displaced populations and putting further strain on field teams already reduced in strength due to security considerations. UNHCR was profoundly concerned about the unrelenting insecurity throughout eastern Chad and the precarious conditions in which literally hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees from Darfur and internally displaced Chadians feared for their lives. UNHCR was also worried about renewed reports of recruitment by all sides of refugees and IDPs in several camps and displacement sites.

Mr. Redmond said the number of Afghans registered by the Government of Pakistan with support from UNHCR would pass the 2 million mark today following the resumption of the registration operation after the break for Ashura and Muharram.
The 2 million people registered since the start of the exercise in October 2006 account for over 80 percent of the target population of 2.4 million Afghans in Pakistan. And finally, returnees to South Sudan and refugees in Bangladesh and Ethiopia would be the beneficiaries of donations from the Dutch Postcode Lottery (NPL) to UNHCR and its NGO partners in the Netherlands.

Catherine Pinot-Sibut of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development said
19 researchers, engineers and students from 10 African countries would participate in a training course on bioinformatics to be held from 4-15 February at the Agricultural Genetic Engineering Research Institute (AGERI) in Giza, Egypt, as part of the "Network of Centres of Excellence" project organized by UNCTAD and funded by the Italian Government. A press conference with more information was available.

Jemini Pandya of the International Organization for Migration said the first IOM assisted convoy expected to carry nearly 300 internally displaced persons (IDPs) would leave the Sudanese capital Khartoum for destinations in South Kordofan on 3 February, marking the start of a mammoth operation to help tens of thousands of IDPs return to their homes in South Sudan. Up to 150,000 IDPs, who have spent an average of 17 years being displaced in north Sudan due to the long-running civil war in the south of the country, were expected to be voluntarily returned in organized movements in the coming months. The returns were being jointly organized by the United Nations, IOM, the Sudanese Government of National Unity and the Government of South Sudan.

Ms. Pandya said in the Philippines, a three-day IOM training and networking workshop bringing together 30 delegates from employment/manpower agencies from Asian migrant sending countries and their European counterparts would open in Manila on 6 February. And in Senegal, IOM and the Economic Community of West African States were jointly organizing a capacity building workshop on "common approaches to irregular migration in West Africa."