REGULAR PRESS BRIEFING BY THE INFORMATION SERVICE
Marie Heuzé, the Director of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, chaired the briefing, which was also attended by Spokespersons for the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the International Labour Organization, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the World Food Programme, the United Nations Refugee Agency, the International Organization for Migration, the World Trade Organization, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
Georgia Talks
Ms. Heuzé said that as announced in New-York on Tuesday,the Secretary-General would be in Geneva next week, on 14 October, on the eve of talks scheduled here on Georgia, which would be held at the initiative of the EU in the Palais des Nations on Wednesday, 15 October. A press briefing would probably be held on 15 October, at the end of the afternoon. The talks were being co-chaired by the European Union, the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. A list of participants and a programme for the meeting should be available next week.
Responding to a question on the programme of work and the participants, Ms. Heuzé said that she only had the basic outline at this point. The meeting was at the expert level. In the morning there would be a plenary meeting, followed by working groups. The Secretary-General would be represented at the talks by his Special Representative, Johan Verbeke.
IAEA Fusion Energy Conference
Also at the Palais des Nations next week, Ms. Heuzé announced that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would be holding its twenty-second Fusion Energy Conference, from 13 October to 18 October. The Conference would open on Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. in the Assembly Hall in the presence of Swiss President, Pascal Couchepin, who would later give a press conference at 10:35 a.m. in Room III. Also present at the opening ceremony would be the Deputy Director General of UNOG, Jan Beagle; the Deputy Director General of the IAEA, Yury Sokolov; and the Deputy Director General for Research of the European Commission, Zoran Stancic. Also on Monday, the IAEA Deputy Director General and Kaname Ikeda, Director General of the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) Organization, would sign a Cooperation Agreement emphasizing the close cooperation between those two organizations. A press release was available. The scenario will be confirmed on Monday.
Human Rights Committee
Also in Geneva next week, the Human Rights Committee would open its ninety-fourth session, which will be held at the Palais Wilson from 13 to 31 October 2008. During the session, the Committee would review the reports presented by Monaco, Japan, Nicaragua and Spain on measures taken to implement the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Committee was scheduled to examine the report of Denmark on Monday and Tuesday, 13 and 14 October; the report of Monaco on Tuesday and Wednesday, 14 and 15 October; the report of Japan on Wednesday and Thursday, 15 and 16 October; the report of Nicaragua on Friday, 17 October; and the report of Spain on Monday and Tuesday, 20 and 21 October. The Committee would present its concluding observations on those reports at the end of its three-week session, on 31 October.
Public Health
Ms. Heuzé said that available in the press room was a statement issued by the Secretary-General yesterday evening, following a meeting with senior executives from the world’s leading pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies working on HIV and AIDS. Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan had begun in 2006 this initiative with UNAIDS, with a view, in particular, to making preventive medicines more affordable and easily available to HIV/AIDS suffers.
Fadela Chaib of the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that WHO would launch its World Health Report, 2008, at a press conference on 14 October, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, at 1 p.m. Geneva time with WHO Director-General, Margaret Chan, Executive Director of UNICEF, Ann Veneman, and the Kazakh Health Minister, Anatoliy Dernovoy. Entitled, “Primary Health Care – Now More Than Ever”, the launch coincided with a conference marking the thirtieth anniversary of the primary health care founding document, the Alma-Ata Declaration. The challenge was to revitalize that document, whose comprehensive approach was more important than ever for developing countries to increase access to health care for their populations.
Copies of the report in English, as well as an overview in several languages, and media advisories and a press release in English, were available at the back of the room, under strict embargo until 14 October at 1 p.m. Geneva time, Ms. Chaib said.
On another topic, regarding the mysterious deaths of three persons in a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa – a woman and the paramedic who had cared for her, as well as a nurse – Ms. Chaib said WHO still did not know the exact cause of those deaths. Samples had been taken and analysed, and four different hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola Virus and Rift Valley Fever, had been ruled out as the cause. WHO was still in the dark as to the cause of the deaths, but experts from WHO’s Africa office were actively researching the case, and they expected to publish an update on the case this afternoon.
Veronique Taveau of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that available was a press release concerning deadly road accidents that were causing child victims in Iran, published on the occasion of Iranian Children’s Day. According to figures from the Ministry of Health and the Police, 28,000 people died each year on the roads in Iran, and Iran had one of the highest traffic-related death rates worldwide. In 2006, 2,700 children were killed in road accidents in Iran, and 95,000 children and adolescents had been hurt. Traffic accidents were the second leading cause of death among children and young persons, aged 5 to 25 years. UNICEF, in conjunction with the Iranian authorities, was therefore launching a massive awareness-raising campaign on road safety, focusing on reducing speed, use of seatbelts and child seats and restraints, and the wearing of helmets.
In the framework of the International Year of Sanitation, next Wednesday, 15 October UNICEF would celebrate International Handwashing Day. On that occasion, UNICEF’s Australian Good Will Ambassadors, the musical group the Wiggles, had written a handwashing song, to the tune of “Frère Jaques” for UNICEF. It was hoped the song would motivate millions of children across the world to wash their hands with soap before eating and after going to the bathroom, a simple gesture that could save millions of lives.
Financial Crisis
Corinne Perthuis of the International Labour Organization (ILO) announced that the Director-General of ILO was participating in the International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington, D.C., where he would stress not just the importance of addressing the current financial crisis, but the necessity that they not lose sight of the social consequences of that crisis. It was not just about injected money into the economy to ensure liquidity, they had to ensure that workers kept a sufficient level of social benefits and that the most vulnerable among them were protected. The Director-General’s address was available at the back of the room, and later today a press release would be sent out.
Responding to a journalist’s questions on how the financial crisis had impacted on their operations, Elisabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that, so far, there had been no impact. However, that did not mean that it would not be felt down the road. That would be one of the topics OCHA Chief John Holmes would bring up next week in meetings with donors in Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Paris and Bern. Emilia Casella of the World Food Programme (WFP) said it was too early at this stage to say if donors would be pulling back. WFP donors had been “quite generous this year”. While they were hearing of bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars, WFP’s budget for the year was just $6 billion, of which they had received about $4 billion so far. WFP was hopeful that their donors would not forget that in a time of urgent financial crisis for everyone in the industrialized world that the crisis also affected the poorest quite severely. “The financial crisis should not be allowed to eclipse the food crisis”, she stressed. Ms. Taveau said that the UNICEF Director-General had been working with different organizations, both public and private, on this issue for a week now. They were definitely working on the issue, but had no official statement to make as yet.
Ethiopia
Ms. Byrs said that the severe impacts of prolonged food insecurity continued to be witnessed in Ethiopia. The Government and its humanitarian partners had now finished an assessment of the situation, in light of which the humanitarian requirements for the next three months had been readjusted, with an estimated 6.4 million people now requiring emergency food assistance to stay alive. That figure had grown from 4.6 million in June this year. Intervals of droughts and rains had ratcheted up the deadly spiral of food insecurity.
OCHA was also worried about the outbreaks of disease in Ethiopia, and recent WHO reports indicated the spread of acute watery diarrhoea to a number of areas, Ms. Byrs added.
Haiti
Ms. Casella of WFP in an update on the situation in Haiti, which was still facing appalling conditions all over the country, said that, since the beginning of the storms, 715,474 people had been reached with food assistance. Most recently, the National Authorities had said that $61 million of agricultural production had been lost, which created a risk of increasing the rural exodus to the cities and putting yet further pressure on food security. So far, WFP had received $16.5 million of its $51.9 million appeal for funds to feed 800,000 people over the next six months. Regarding WFP’s latest activities on the ground, WFP had been using helicopters to airlift equipment, and on 7 and 8 October it had used helicopters to airlift two water treatment plants for the Spanish Red Cross in the departments of Nippes and Ouest.
Other
Ron Redmond of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said that High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres would be giving a briefing today, at 1 p.m. in this room. He would cover some of the main concerns coming out of the weeklong Executive Committee meeting, and specifically how he viewed the potential impact of the global economic downturn on humanitarian work and refugees.
In the Gulf of Aden, Mr. Redmond reported another tragedy. UNHCR and its partners were searching for about 100 people reported missing after being forced overboard by smugglers off the coast of Yemen. Some of the 47 known survivors told UNHCR’s team in Yemen that a smuggling boat carrying about 150 passengers departed the Somali port of Marera on Monday and had spent three days crossing the Gulf. Upon arriving 5 kilometres off the Yemen coast, all but 12 of the passengers – who had been placed in a smaller boat – had been forced overboard to swim to shore. Survivors said they had counted a total of 47 people reaching shore, and later saw Yemeni authorities burying five bodies. By yesterday afternoon, the survivors were being transferred to the UNHCR reception centre in Yemen.
Speaking on a programme to help qualified Sudanese return to South Sudan, Jean-Philippe Chauzy of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that 15 qualified teachers displaced by years of civil war had now left camps in and around Khartoum to return to South Sudan's Unity State to take up employment. Those returns were part of IOM’s Return and Reintegration of Qualified Sudanese programme, which had been instrumental in returning qualified professionals to a number of areas in the interior of the country.
Janaina Borges of the World Trade Organization (WTO) announced the WTO schedule for next week. Copies of the WTO schedule, and the agenda of the Director-General, were available in the press room.
Luisa Ballin of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) announced that the one-hundred and nineteenth IPU Assembly would be held next week, from 13 to 15 October in Geneva at the Geneva International Conference Centre. In particular, she highlighted a proposal for an emergency meeting on the role of parliaments in controlling the global financial crisis and its impact on national economies, as well as the holding of a panel discussion on the role of parliaments in advancing nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, and securing the entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which would be held from 9.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. in Room 1. She also noted that the President of the Iranian Parliament had requested a press conference, which would be held on Tuesday afternoon at 2.30 p.m. A media alert on the panel discussion, as well as a press release and a participants’ list for the Assembly, were available at the back of the room.