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 Economic Commission for Europe, the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development, the World Meteorological Organization, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations Refugee Agency, the World Health Organization, the International Organization for Migration, the World Food Programme, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

ACANU announced that the end of the year party would be held on Friday, 9 December at the Palais des Nations and invited all journalists and Spokespersons.

Geneva Activities

Ms. Momal-Vanian said today was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Available at the back of the room was the message of the Secretary-General on this occasion in English and in French. There was a UN webpage “United to End Violence against Women” with more information available endviolence.un.org, including figures by country and United Nations efforts to fight violence against women.

A Special Meeting would be held at the Palais des Nations on Tuesday, 29 November to mark the annual observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The Special Meeting would take place from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Salle XIX. A press release was sent out yesterday with more information.

The Committee against Torture was at noon today holding a press conference in Salle III at the end of its forty-seventh session to speak about its concluding observations and recommendations on the reports of Morocco, Djibouti, Paraguay, Germany, Sri Lanka, Bulgaria, Madagascar and Belarus whose reports were reviewed during the session. A roundup press release would be put out later today.

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights yesterday concluded its review of the report of Argentina which was the last country report it was reviewing during this session. The Committee would meet in private until 2 Friday when it would issue its concluding observations and recommendations on the reports of Estonia, Israel, Turkmenistan, Cameroon and Argentina before closing the session.

The Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, would represent the Secretary-General at the opening of the sixteenth session of the Conference of States parties to the Convention on Chemical Weapons which will be held in The Hague from Monday 28 November to Friday 2 December. On 28 November, the Director-General would deliver the Secretary-General’s statement to the session.

There were a number of press conferences that were taking place. Today, between the briefing and the noon press conference with the Committee against Torture, UNICEF would be updating journalists about the situation of children in the Horn of Africa. Speaking would be Elhadj As Sy, UNICEF Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa.

On Monday, 28 November at 3 p.m. in Salle III, there would be a press conference on the findings of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria. The authors of the Commission's report: Paulo Pinheiro (Chairperson), Karen Koning AbuZayd and Yakin Ertürk would be speaking at the press conference.

Economic Commission for Europe

Jean Rodriguez of the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) referred to the Secretary-General’s announcement this week that he was appointing ECE Executive Secretary Jan Kubis as his Special Representative for Afghanistan. Mr. Kubis would be taking up his new post in Afghanistan in the middle of January.

Mr. Rodriguez said that on 1 and 2 December, the UNECE Regional Preparatory Meeting of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development would be held in Salle XVIII. The meeting would prepare the input from the UNECE region to the global preparatory process for the Rio+20 Conference. It would assess progress in the implementation of sustainable development commitments in the region and address new and emerging challenges. It would also discuss green economy in the context of poverty eradication and sustainable development and the institutional framework for sustainable development.

The second major meeting to take place next week was the substantive segment of the sixth session of the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Integration which would be held from 30 November to 2 December in Salle VII. The session would discuss economies in transition in the ECE region.

World Meteorological Organization

Claire Nullis of the World Meteorological Organization said on 29 November, the WMO would release its provisional statement on the state of the global climate in 2011. WMO did this every year and the statement gave details of temperatures around the world, extreme weather and hurricanes activity. The statement was being released at 8:30 GMT, which was 9:30 Geneva time, in Durban which was where the conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was taking place. The press conference in Durban would be led by the WMO Deputy Secretary-General. The WMO Secretary-General and the experts who compiled the report would give a press conference in Geneva in Salle III at 9:30 Geneva time on 29 November.

World Trade Organization

Ankai XU of the World Trade Organization said on 28 November, there would be a trade party review for Thailand at 10 a.m., and it would continue on 30 November. Also on 30 November, there would be a General Council meeting. As for the Director-General Pascal Lamy, on 30 November, he would attend the General Council meeting and he would also meet with the Commonwealth Secretary-General. On 1 and 2 December, he would be in Accra, Ghana, where he would attend the African Union Ministers Summit.

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

Catherine Sibut Pinot of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said the press conference presenting the report on technology and innovation had been postponed and would now be held on Tuesday, 29 November at noon in Salle III. The report was embargoed until 5 p.m. Tuesday.
Sudan and South Sudan

Raouf Mazou, UNHCR’s African Bureau Deputy Director for East and Horn of Africa, Chad and Sudan, said he wanted to focus on the new situation that the agency was facing in Sudan and South Sudan since August. They had seen large population movements from Sudan into Ethiopia and into South Sudan, rising in August in both countries to about 76,000 persons. In Western Ethiopia, there were about 36,000 persons who had arrived. The vast majority of them remained close to the border. Some 16,000 to 17,000 had been transferred to camps. In Sudan, there had been two movements, one from Blue Nile towards Upper Nile, around 16,000 people, and the other was a major influx into Unity from South Kordofan, around 20,000 persons. The challenge they were facing now was that these people were in extremely remote locations which were difficult to access. So far, the assistance had been provided by helicopter. If this trend continued, they were likely to see in the coming few weeks up to 100,000 refugees having fled Sudan into South Sudan and Ethiopia.

World Health Organization and Patient Safety

Tarik Jasarevic of the World Health Organization (WHO) said that according to studies conducted in a number of African hospitals, healthcare-associated infections rate prevalence was between 2.5 per cent and 14.8 per cent. The WHO Patient Safety Programme was launching a second wave of Europe to Africa Hospital Partnership to improve patient safety in five countries. This programme aimed to build sustainable patient safety partnership between hospitals in countries of the WHO African region and hospitals in other regions. There were fact sheets with more details at the back of the room.

Edward Kelley, Coordinator of the WHO Patient Safety Programme, said that in 2002, the world asked WHO to address the problem of unsafe and poor quality health care that was causing major physical, financial and emotional problems. In response, the WHO patient safety programme was created in 2004. The research conducted showed that 1 in 10 patients was harmed during their hospital care in developing countries and every day 1.4 million patients worldwide suffered from an infection in a health care setting. In response, WHO carried out a campaign around the world to educate the world on the problem of patient safety, but for many years they were unable to make progress in the African region. It was not until the creation of the African partnerships for patient safety programme in 2009 that there was the first international approach to improving hospital patient safety in Africa. In this era of constrained budgets, this tiny programme was making a big difference because it was working in a different way. They had developed Africa to Europe partnerships between beacon hospitals in each of the 46 countries in the WHO AFRO region and partners in European hospitals in the United Kingdom and in France. Today they were launching the second wave of partnerships between hospitals in the United Kingdom and hospitals in Ghana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia and they would focus on health care associated infections and surgical safety.

Tonny Tumwesigye, Director of the Kisiizi Hospital in Uganda, said before the partnership, it was common for doctors and others at Kisiizi Hospital not to wash their hands between patients. Now the practice had changed and they were also using alcohol-based hand gel, which was produced locally. The programme had allowed them to see a drop of infections in their hospital from 6 to 1 per cent. The partnership had also stimulated infrastructure change in the hospital and brought overall improvement of the health services provided by the hospital.

International Organization for Migration

Jean-Philippe Chauzy of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said an IOM sponsored convoy of 13 trucks carrying more than 840 African migrants had crossed into Chad after travelling from the southern Libyan town of Sebha. IOM staff met them with fresh supplies and assistance. This was the second land evacuation from Sebha after a previous evacuation in October when more than 1,220 Africans representing 12 different nationalities were assisted. IOM was planning further air evacuations of stranded Gambian, Senegalese, Malian, Ghanaian and Nigerian migrants who wanted to return home.

Pakistan

Ms. Momal-Vanian said 5 million persons were now estimated to need assistance in Pakistan, and that their needs were under-reported.

Gaëlle Sévenier of the World Food Programme (WFP) said since 12 September, WFP had distributed food rations to more than 2.9 million persons in Sindh and Balochistan. The rate of food insecurity in Sindh was the highest in Pakistan with three quarters of the population in a state of food insecurity. The malnutrition rate was 23 per cent in the south of the province. An assessment had shown that 2.5 million persons in Sindh were in a situation of grave food insecurity. WFP had received $ 63 million out of the
$ 133 million requested to finance its operations. There were fact sheets at the back of the room with more details.

Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that, according to the recently completed joint UN-Government Multi-Sectoral needs Assessment, of the more than 5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in Sindh and Balochistan provinces, 25 per cent were women and 50 per cent were children. With 797,000 homes either destroyed or damaged, many of the estimated 1.2 million returnees had returned to homes that either needed to be repaired or entirely rebuilt. As of the end of October, water had receded from two-thirds of the flood affected areas, but 34 per cent of initially flooded land was still waterlogged. Around 660,000 people in Sindh and more than 83,800 in Balochistan were still displaced. Concerning funding, the appeal for $357 million had received $ 129 million, meaning it was 36 per cent funded. There were more details in the briefing notes.

Mr. Chauzy of IOM said tents or plastic tarpaulin shelter kits had now reached just 441,000 families, according to the cluster of aid agencies providing emergency shelter and non food relief items, which was coordinated by IOM. Another 127,000 shelter kits were in the cluster pipeline, but the shortfall remained huge. In relation to the 2010 floods in Pakistan, IOM this week had reached a milestone with the completion of 30,000 of the planned 38,000 flood resistant, self-built one-room shelters for families affected by the 2010 Pakistan floods.

Marixie Mercado of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said around one third of villages were still under water, but the vast majority of the families had returned to within three kilometres of their homes, many of them to disastrous conditions. The 2011 floods damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, almost half of health facilities and close to 10,000 schools. The floods also contaminated a large number of water sources. For now, the most urgent risks to children were those related to safe water and malnutrition conditions. A 2011 national nutritional survey conducted with UNICEF’s report before this year’s floods found rates of global acute malnutrition above the WHO emergency thresholds. UNICEF’s $ 50 million funding appeal was launched in September and to date was funded by 31 per cent. Before the floods, Pakistan was already the country with the fourth largest number of children dying due to preventable causes before the floods. The floods of the past two years had magnified the risks for children.

Mr. Rodriguez of ECE said Pakistan was not an UNECE country, however, it was a country which participated in many of the ECE’s activities, including on the standardization of agricultural products. Possible ratification by Pakistan of one of the ECE’s conventions could facilitate trans-border road transport.



For use of the information media; not an official record