5 years 4 months ago
Transcript of press encounter with Jan Egeland, Special Advisor to the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, after a meeting of the Humanitarian Access Task Force
08 April 2016
Press Conferences
Jan Egeland (JE): We had our eighth meeting of the Task Force on Humanitarian Access. We have been working for nearly two months and April was supposed to be our best month. It’s not looking so. So far I am disappointed and disheartened at what we achieved over the last week. We have a new procedure now saying that after seven days we should get a permission to go to a place and then, within another three days, we should have the final clearance to actually go.
According to…
5 years 4 months ago
Opening Remarks by Mr. Michael Møller United Nations Under-Secretary-General, Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva at the Geneva Conference on “Preventing Violent Extremism – The Way Forward”
07 April 2016
Press Conferences
It is a pleasure to welcome you all to the Geneva Conference on ‘Preventing Violent Extremism – The Way Forward’. I sincerely thank our co-host, the Swiss Government, for its support and cooperation in making this important event happen.
As we have witnessed terrorist attacks in Belgium, Cote d’Ivoire, Iraq, Mali, Pakistan, Turkey and other places over the past weeks there can be no doubt about the relevance of the topic of this…
5 years 4 months ago
Transcript of Press encounter by Jan Egeland, Special Advisor to the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, following the Task Force meeting on Humanitarian Access in Syria
31 March 2016
Press Conferences
JE: Thank you very much, we just finished a meeting with the ISSG task force on humanitarian access to Syria, we reviewed and compared progress this year compared to last year. 2015 did, in the first three months give us access to only one besieged area that was Yarmouk at the time. All the other besieged areas there was zero contact with or access to, and the year 2015 ended up by children starving to death in Madaya and them being close to starvation in a number of…
5 years 4 months ago
Near verbatim transcript of press stakeout by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi
30 March 2016
Press Conferences
SG: High Commissioner Filippo Grandi and I have just taken part in an important meeting on sharing responsibility for Syrian refugees through pathways for admission. We are all aware that there is no substitute for a comprehensive and credible political settlement in Syria, and we welcome signs of progress towards that end. My Special Envoy, Staffan de Mistura, has been doing everything possible to advance the negotiations. To achieve early results, he requires the full and unified support of the international…
5 years 4 months ago
Near verbatim transcript of press conference by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura
24 March 2016
Press Conferences
Moderator: Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for your patience. Here we are at the end of the first round of the Intra-Syrian talks. You’ve heard the UN Special Envoy almost every day since the beginning of these talks and tonight he intends to give you a wrap-up of where we are. A few comments as usual perhaps and then we take questions.
SdeM: Good afternoon. I have been thinking – and you have to forgive me if I tell you things that look more like background before I give you the punch line – but I have been thinking that it would be fair…
5 years 4 months ago
Transcript of stakeout by the Special Advisor to the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Mr. Jan Egeland
23 March 2016
Press Conferences
JE: We are making further progress in getting access to the civilian population in Syria and we are concentrating, in the taskforce on humanitarian access, on the besieged areas but also equally important the so-called hard-to-reach areas. Importantly, last night we were able to reach – with an inter-agency convoy of UN, ICRC, and Syrian Arab Red Crescent – Al Houla in Homs. That is important, of course – the last UN convoy to this place was in October. Since January it has been terrible in Al Houla, and 56,000 people getting…
5 years 4 months ago
Transcript of joint stakeout by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura and European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Federica Mogherini
23 March 2016
Press Conferences
SdeM: I am delighted to be able to be together with the EU High Representative, Federica Mogherini, who has been asked by me, and I am very grateful to you, for being here on a special day. Not only because it is an occasion for all of us at the UN to, through you, express our strong solidarity to the city where you are, to the country where you are, and to Europe that you represent so well, because what happened yesterday…
5 years 4 months ago
Transcript of press stakeout by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura
22 March 2016
Press Conferences
[In response to a question about the composition of the Syrian Women’s Advisory Board delegation, the Special Envoy said the following before delivering his own statement at the stakeout.]
SdeM: I can tell you that they really represent various realities of the Syrian situation. One of them is a mother and wife of a person who has disappeared, the other one is certainly wearing traditional clothes, in other words you haven’t seen them all. And trust me they are quite impressive in the way also they represent, in my opinion, every component of Syria. Some of them…
5 years 4 months ago
Transcript of press encounter by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura
21 March 2016
Press Conferences
SdeM: Good evening. First of all some logistics. Today the meetings took place both with the government, and I think you had the opportunity of listening to Ambassador Jaafari about his own take on the meeting with us, and then with civil society. Tomorrow will be the HNC in particular and others, but in particular the HNC.
Of course I intend to meet again the government and the HNC, in particular both Wednesday and Thursday morning, before we conclude this first phase of our Intra-Syrian Talks.
There are moments frankly when I am not going to go too much into…
5 years 5 months ago
Transcript of press encounter by United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura
18 March 2016
Press Conferences
SdeM: Good afternoon, today is the end of the first week. The first week of what we have been waiting for, for a very long time, Intra-Syrian talks. It has coincided to a large degree, today there were some incidents, but to a large degree, to a substantial reduction of violence. I have been checking now with the operations center, as you know, which is working day and night, that the military activities in respect of the cessation of hostilities had been more than by and large, except today, as I said there were some incidents, but not comparable…
