REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE
Ahmad Fawzi, Director a.i. of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing attended by spokespersons for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, World Health Organization, World Food Programme, International Organization for Migration, United Nations Refugee Agency and the World Trade Organization.
Geneva activities
Mr. Fawzi said that the Conference on Disarmament, which had opened its 2016 session opened this week and would hold its next public meeting on 2 February, at 10 a.m. The previous Tuesday, at the first public meeting of its 2016 session, the Conference had adopted its agenda and heard a declaration of the UN Secretary General, read by the Acting High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Mr Kim Won-soo. During this opening meeting, many delegations had condemned the recent nuclear test by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. This 2016 session begins under the Presidency of Nigeria (until the 21rst of February). This year, the CD will also be successively chaired by Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Poland and the Republic of Korea.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child was closing today its 71st session. It would shortly issue its concluding observations concerning the 14 countries reviewed during the current session: Senegal, Iran, Latvia, Oman, France, Ireland, Peru, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Maldives, Zambia, Benin, Brunei Darussalam and Kenya.
The Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review Working Group would conclude its 24th session this afternoon after adopting its reports for Sierra Leone and Singapore at
5 p.m. A short roundup would be sent out after the session.
Mr. Fawzi informed that today at 11.30 a.m. in Room III, the WHO would launch its Smoke-Free Movies Report. The new WHO Smoke-Free Movies Report described the film industry’s influence on tobacco consumption and called for actions to curb the powerful impact that movies could have on promoting that deadly habit among children and adolescents. The speaker would be Dr Armando Peruga, Coordinator, WHO Tobacco Free Initiative.
Jessica Hermosa, for the World Trade Organization (WTO), said that the Director-General would be meeting with EU trade ministers the following week in Amsterdam. On
2 February, the Director-General would be meeting with the Trade Minister of Morocco, and the Trade Policy Review of Morocco would follow on 4 February. On 5 February, an informal meeting of the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade would take place.
Syria
Mr. Fawzi informed that ID passes issued for those press corps who had arrived the previous week were expiring and could be renewed at the Pregny Gate today after
2 p.m., for another two weeks. The talks would start as planned and as announced by the Special Envoy. More information would be available later this morning. The Special Envoy’s spokesperson Khawla Matar would be in contact with the journalists when the talks had commenced.
Asked about the besieged cities in Syria, Bettina Luescher, for the World Food Programme (WFP), said that there had been various discussions in the Security Council. As of today, an estimated 4.6 million people were besieged in 18 areas. WFP was appealing that all humanitarian actors be given access to those areas so that they could deliver life-saving aid. OCHA had the exact list of cities and towns. Ms. Luescher said that it was important to think of all the places which might not be in the headlines today, where men, women and children were desperate and in need of urgent help.
Asked if the WFP had thought of air-dropping supplies, Ms. Luescher said that it was a “very hard thing to pull off”, requiring a safe airspace as well as a secured area on the ground, where large packages could land safely. There also had to be people on the ground to distribute those goods. That was not possible under the current situation. Trucks were the safest way to deliver aid at the moment.
There was nothing new regarding the situation in Madaya, said Ms. Luescher. It was a very complicated and bureaucratic process, and only a very small number of permissions had been given access to besieged areas, where tens of thousands of families were still waiting for aid. That was why putting an end to the fighting was paramount. WFP was talking to all sides, but an agreement had to be made on the ground.
Responding to a question on those coming to Geneva to take part in the Syrian talks, Rupert Colville, for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said that there were lists of alleged human rights violators compiled by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, but those were not convictions; the evidence would be subsequently available to competent courts.
Central African Republic Sexual Abuse Allegations
Mr. Rupert Colville informed the press that United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein was extremely alarmed at continuing allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse of minors in the Central African Republic (CAR) by members of foreign military forces. The alleged crimes had taken place mostly in 2014, but had only come to light in recent weeks.
A joint United Nations team in the CAR had recently interviewed a number of girls who said they had been sexually exploited or abused by foreign soldiers. Four of the girls (aged between 14 and 16 at the time of the alleged abuse) had said their abusers were attached to contingents operating as part of the European Union operation (EUFOR / CAR); three of them had said they believed their abusers were members of the Georgian EUFOR contingent. United Nations human rights staff had also interviewed a girl and a boy who were aged 7 and 9 respectively when they had been allegedly abused in 2014 by French Sangaris troops. Another country had been approached by the High Commissioner, but its name was not being revealed, as in this case it was one allegation against one soldier, and needed to be corroborated, Mr. Colville said in response to a journalist’s question.
All six cases involving non-UN foreign military forces had taken place in, or near, the M’Poko camp for displaced people next to the airport in the capital, Bangui.
Over the past week High Commissioner Zeid had raised the cases with the European, Georgian and French authorities, as well as with another country on a similar allegation for which additional corroboration was needed. All four authorities had promptly responded to the High Commissioner and had stated that they had already begun investigations or had referred the cases to relevant judicial authorities in their respective countries. More details and quotes from the High Commissioner available in the press release.
While the cases raised by the High Commissioner related to non-UN military forces, a number of cases involving UN peacekeepers had also come to light during the interviews carried out by the joint UN team. Those cases were being raised separately with the relevant Troop Contributing Countries by UN Peacekeeping (DFS / DPKO), in accordance with the standard policy of UN headquarters in New York. DFS would be giving more information on the UN-related cases later today in New York.
Asked to provide more details, Mr. Colville said that most of the alleged UN cases had taken place in 2014 and a couple in 2015. DPKO was trying to clarify those details; OHCHR was looking at non-UN abuses, but when there were UN peacekeepers involved, DPKO was taking a leading role. It was currently difficult to provide numbers of soldiers involved. In some cases, girls seemed to have been abused by both EUFOR and UN soldiers; it appeared that some 10 different contingents, both UN and non-UN, had been involved in the abuse, which Mr. Colville qualified as “rampant”.
Mr. Colville stressed that it was a problem with the armies, which seemed not to have done enough to rectify the problem, although the situation may have improved recently. Mr. Colville also said that it was important to remember the contribution that the peacekeepers were making to bringing down the violence in the country.
In response to another question, Mr. Colville also specified that those were newly revealed allegations but that the events had all taken place in 2014. The total number of cases or allegations was seven against French troops and four against EUFOR, although in some cases, there had reportedly been repeated abuses against a number of children.
Mr. Colville stated that there had been a successful conviction of a French peacekeeper, related to a previous operation, not CAR. On another question, Mr. Colville said that there had been far too few convictions of peacekeepers involved. Often times people had been repatriated, but at the end of the day countries could not be forced to produce court cases. Now there was a shift, more transparency was to be expected, and the Secretary-General remained very engaged on the issue.
Zika virus
Christian Lindmeier, for the World Health Organization (WHO), said that an Emergency Committee of the WHO would take place on 1 February in the afternoon. It would be a closed, “virtual” meeting, facilitated from Geneva but including experts from around the world, not all physically present in the same room. There would be no press opportunities that day, but at the end of the meeting the Committee would draft a statement which would go to the Director General of the WHO. A press conference would take place whenever the statement would be available, which could be one day later or more, on 2 or 3 February. The main concern of the Emergency Committee was not Zika per se, but the connection between Zika and microcephaly as well as Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Mr. Lindmeier said that a media advisory would be sent shortly with the list of participants.
In response to a question from a journalist, Mr. Lindmeier said that the first notification about Zika cases had been received in March or May 2015 by the regional office. The first public notification issued by headquarters had been dated 21 October 2015, but by that time, the regional office had already been working on the issue for months with Colombia and Brazil. Mr. Lindmeier also confirmed that the Pan American Health Organization’s estimate of four million Zika cases was an estimate from the region which the WHO was “running with”.
In response to another question, Mr. Lindmeier said that he would check back regarding a possible case of polio in Libya.
Mediterranean migrants
Joel Millman, for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), reported another shipwreck off Greece on 28 January. He said that the deaths were increasing at an alarming rate on that route. IOM had reported the 50 deaths two weeks, 95 the following week, and a few days after that, almost 160. As of today, 218 deaths on the Aegean-Eastern Mediterranean route between Greece and Turkey were reported (244 including the numbers from Italy). There had not been as many deaths on the Aegean side of the Mediterranean in 2015 until mid-September. Deaths were also increasing in the Central Mediterranean, from Libya to Sicily. Six bodies were found in a boat rescued at sea today.
The number of arrivals by sea for the month of January was just over 55,000, which was a relatively small number, however, deaths were occurring by the dozen every day. IOM was alarmed by a trend of small boats overpacked with refugees, resulting in doyens of deaths, with at least half of the victims being children.
In response to a journalist’s question, Mr. Millman said that nationality-wise, the refugees continued to be overwhelmingly Syrian (more than half, according to Greek authorities), followed by migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq. The victims of the latest shipwreck were all Kurds from Iraq. He also said that the increase in deaths could be attributed to more reckless tactics on the sending side, with ruthless gangs having taken over the trade (this was the case in Libya), and less sea-worthy, more over-crowded boats.
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Leo Dobbs, for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), said that the situation in North Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo remained extremely volatile, and continued to create displacement. Waves of violence by Mai Mai militias and rebel groups including the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) of Uganda, had forced large numbers of people to flee. Since November 2015, at least 15,000 people had sought shelter in sites for the displaced run by UNHCR or IOM. Tens of thousands more were estimated to be living with local families. The displacement also came at a time when the Congolese army had been conducting military operations against the FDLR and other rebel groups. UNHCR believed it was urgent for the authorities to address growing tensions in eastern DRC and scale up support to the newly displaced.
In the latest major forced mass movement, more than 21,000 people had fled from Miriki village and surrounding areas in North Kivu’s Lubero Territory on January 7 after the killing of at least 14 people in a night raid by suspected FDLR forces. The FDLR had also been battling Mai Mai groups in the province’s Walikale Territory. In early January 2016, different estimates were putting the number displaced from this fighting at 70,000-82,000. The fighting between the FDLR and militias had also forced more than 33,000 to flee to Uganda in 2015. Meanwhile, the ADF had continued to wage a campaign of terror and sporadic attacks and ambushes against the local population and Congolese armed forces in the north of the province. In the previous month, ADF clashes with the military had left an estimated 20,000 people internally displaced in Beni.
According to Mr. Dobbs, continuing violence in the DRC was very much a neglected story.
High Commissioner for Refugees - Visit to Ethiopia
Mr. Dobbs announced that UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi had arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to attend the 26th African Union Summit. On 1 February, he would visit the refugee camps in Shire in northern Ethiopia, which were hosting 38,000 Eritrean refugees. This would be his first field trip to Africa in his capacity as UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He would also meet leaders of several African countries in Addis.