UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to visit Bern 16-17 October
BERN, SWITZERLAND – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be received in Bern 17 October by a Swiss delegation led by President Micheline Calmy-Rey, for an official working visit. It is the UN leader’s first official Swiss visit since April 2007.
The agenda covers “a number of UN-related themes of mutual interest,” Bern says in its announcement, in particular setting priorities.
Ban Ki-moon will be in Bern 16 October to attend the inaugural ceremony of the 125th Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, IPU, which Switzerland is hosting.
During his visit to Bern he will meet with six youths from different Arab nations, all of whom have been involved in Arab Spring protests.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, opened the UN General Assembly in New York Wednesday with a plea to resolve the Israeli-Palestine impasse, saying that while Israel needs security, Palestine needs statehood. The remarks were made in the presence of US President Obama and Palestine’s President Mahmoud Abbas.
The US insists that Palestinian membership in the UN can come only through a negotiated settlement and says it will use its veto to stop a bid for membership that Abbas says he will announce during a scheduled speech to the UN Friday.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Ban Ki-moon was roundly applauded Tuesday in New York when the 15 members of the Security Council and 5 member-nations approved his second term, with no opposition, a rare honour. Thursday, the newly re-elected secretary-general turned the spotlight on the world’s estimated 245 million widows, more than 115 million of whom live in extreme poverty.
The United Nations in 2010 declared 23 June every year as International Widows Day to draw attention to the widespread abuse of widows’ human rights, and today is the first such day marked by the organization. “Interpretations of customary codes, as well as traditional mourning and burial rites, often deny widows virtually all of their universally recognized rights,” says Ban.
Women are frequently widowed young in conflict areas, and they bear the burden of caring for children, with unrest, displacement and lack of support as major problems.
“In places where a widow’s status is linked to her husband, she may find herself suddenly shunned and isolated. Marriage, whether she desires it or not, may be the only way for a widow to regain her footing in society,” notes Ban. “Some of these widows are teenagers or even younger. The death of their husbands can leave a terrible legacy these widows must endure throughout their remaining years.”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The announcement 6 June by United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon that he will run for a second term was greeted positively Tuesday by US President Barack Obama, who says he will support Ki-moon. The UN’s Secretary General is unopposed at the moment.
“Under Ban’s leadership, the United Nations has played a critical role in responding to crises and challenges across the globe, including most recently supporting democratic transitions in Cote d’Ivoire and earthquake-affected Haiti, the conduct of the referendum on South Sudan’s self-determination, and efforts to resolve the political and humanitarian crisis in Libya,” the US White House says in a statement issued Tuesday.
The White House calls the UN an “an imperfect, but indispensible institution” but notes that under Ban Ki-moon’s guidance important reforms have been made, “such as increasing the hiring of women to senior posts and proposing the deepest reduction in the UN’s budget in more than a decade. The United States strongly supports further efforts for reform to improve effectiveness, streamline bureaucracy, reduce costs, and update business practices to improve the United Nations’ ability to meet its mandate to promote global peace and security, human rights and development.”
The UN leader said, in announcing his intentions at a press conference Monday, pointed to the work ahead that he believes must be the focus for the UN: “In recent years, we have begun to make real progress on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. We must maintain that critical momentum.
“We must redouble our efforts to deliver on the Millennium Development Goals. For hundreds of millions of the world’s people, development means hope. We cannot fall short. And beyond that, we face the “50-50-50” challenge. By the year 2050, the world’s population will reach 9 billion – 50 percent more [than] a decade ago. By that time, the world must cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent.”
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The world football federation (Fifa) is not ready to set dates for the controversial 2022 Qatar World Cup, but its president, Sepp Blatter, told journalists at the IOC (Internationasl Olympic Committee) in Lausanne 25 January that the Cup could be held at the start or end of the year.
Fifa has come under fire for saying the World Cup could be held in winter to avoid the summer heat of Qatar, since it will be held in a year when the Olympic Winter Games will be on. These run at the start of the year, normally beginning at the end of January. The 2022 Games will not be awarded until 2015.
Blatter was in Lausanne for a visit to the IOC by UN head Ban Ki-moon.
UN Director-General Ban Ki-moon and IOC head Jacques Rogge meet in Lausanne
Sports for peace projects include Olympics work on achieving MDGs
IOC's Jacques Rogge with UN's Ban Ki-moon in Lausanne 25 January 2011 (photo ©2011, ioc/Richard Juilliart)
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The heads of the United Nations and the Olympic movement met in Lausanne 25 January to review work they have done together since the UN gave the IOC observer status in 2010.
The move was linked to the IOC starting a number of sports for peace projects. The Tuesday meeting covered new joint efforts to make it easier for Palestinian and Israeli athletes to participate in sports competitions and the adoption by the UN of the Olympic Truce Resolution for the London 2012 Olympic Games.
The meeting follows by five days a landmark “modus vivendi” understanding that was reached between the Israeli and Palestinian National Olympic Committees when the two met for the first time in Lausanne last week.
Part of the agreement calls for Israel to help Palestinian athletes train in order to be able to compete in the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Namibia refugee camp project has IOC working on non-competitive sports agenda
Laurent Gbagbo, former president of Cote d’Ivoire, says he has invited the international community to re-evaluate his country’s contested election results and is prepared to sit down and talk with his rival, the internationally recognized winner of the elections, Alassane Ouattara. He said Tuesday 21 December that his demand that UN and French peacekeeping forces withdraw from Cote d’Ivoire still stands.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that there is a “real risk” of civil war resuming in Cote d’Ivoire, as the stalemate surrounding last month’s disputed presidential elections continues. Gbagbo, who still claims to be president, ordered a blockade of the UN peacekeeping force’s encampment after the UN renewed its mandate until June 2011 and refused to withdraw from the country. The Golf Hotel, which is the headquarters of the opposition, is being protected by UN forces and has also been blockaded.
Ban has asked the international community to provide support to the the peacekeeping force, Unoci. Isolated cases of violence against Unoci members have occurred and civilians have been targeted in attacks by soldiers and armed masked militias.
Links to other sites: Al-Jazeera, AP, Vibeghana
The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned a roadside bombing on the convoy of the UN’s senior representative in the southern city of Najaf, Iraq, Tuesday 19 October. One person on the convoy’s security detail was killed and several others injured. None of the UN staff was hurt.
Ad Melkert, the UN’s senior diplomat in Iraq, was returning to the airport at 16:00 after meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s most revered Shiite cleric, in an attempt to break the political logjam, since inconclusive elections in March.
Iraqi security sources said the target of the bomb may have been the Najaf chief of police who was travelling in the convoy. Roadside bombings are still common in Iraq. Six were recorded on Tuesday.
Links to other sites: Al-Jazeera, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The report by a panel that investigated the Israeli raid on a flotilla of boats aiming to land in Gaza in May has been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The raid by Israeli armed forces resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish activists, one of them also a US citizen. The report says that six of the dead activists were summarily executed by Israeli marines. The panel found that Israel violated international law by using excessive force.
A resolution backing the findings was adopted 30-1 with 15 abstentions 29 September by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, which ordered the investigation. The resolution leaves the door open to legal action.
The USA was the sole country to oppose the motion, charging that the investigation was not balanced. Israel declined to cooperate with the investigation. Israel says it will cooperate with a separate panel established by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to investigate the May incidents.
Links to other sites: AFP, Haaretz, Washington Post
Governments asked Ban Ki-moon and IPCC for external review
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Chair Rajendra Pachauri have asked the InterAcademy Council (IAC), a group of the world’s leading science academies, to review the scientific procedures of the Geneva-based IPCC. IPCC was created in 1986 but came into the limelight in 2007 when it won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with former US Vice-president Al Gore for work on climate change. The group has come under pressure since the news surfaced in recent months that its 2007 report on climate change contained scientific errors which were not caught in the approvals and editing process.
The two men asked for the review after IPCC member governments requested it.
In a statement issued as part of a press conference in New York to announce the review, the IPCC and the Ban’s office stated that:
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has asked former US President Bill Clinton to coordinate relief and reconstruction efforts for Haiti, battered by a 12 January earthquake. Ban asked Clinton “to assume a leadership role in coordinating international aid efforts, from emergency response to new construction of Haiti”, reports CNN. Clinton told Ban he would do the best he could. By some calculations, over $1 billion worldwide has been raised for the relief effort and money is still being collected.
The official death toll from the earthquake has reached 200,000 people, according to Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, who added that another 300,000 are in hospitals and health care centres. He said that over one million people were made homeless and estimated that 250,000 homes and 30,000 businesses had been destroyed.
Links to other sites: Economist, CNN, Press TV, Washington Post
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon arrived in Larnaca, on Sunday in a bid to accelerate peace talks for the reunification of Cyprus.
This current visit comes a week after negotiations organised by The United Nations were held between Greek Cypriot leader Demetris Christofias and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talet. Despite progress in some sectors, the UN-led talks failed to establish how to resolve national boundaries and property claims from many individuals displaced within the island.
The present objective of the UN is to unify the divided island as two federal zones under a central government. “I’m here to show my personal support, ” Ban Ki-moon told reporters. “My visit is a reflection of the importance I attach to the current effort.”
Elections to be held on April 18 could see Cyprus divided if a Turkish Cypriot leader is elected, regardless of how the reunification talks go.
Links to other sites: Al-jazeera, BBC
The world food security conference in Rome, Italy closed 18 November with promises to invest more in agriculture and “to eradicate hunger at the earliest date”, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which hosted the three-day event. FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf expressed his disappointment at the lack of measurable targets and specific deadlines.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that each day 17,000 children die of hunger in the world. He urged immediate action on long-term remedies to hunger in the world, noting that there was enough food in the world for everybody.
The Minister for Food and Agriculture of Ghana, Kwesi Ahwoi, reminded the conference that the last food security summit in 1996 had pledged to cut the world’s hungry by half, to 420 million by 2015. The conference was told that more than one billion people go to bed hungry every night.
Links to other sites:FAO media site, Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, Guide2.co.nz
© 2009 CICG
Complete coverage of the WCC-3 by GenevaLunch
Conference is 31 August – 4 September 2009
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The third World Climate Conference (WCC-3) promises “better climate information for a better future” but in the immediate short term it is expected to cause a severe strain on Geneva’s traffic and accommodations this week.
Lake Geneva
Complete coverage of the WCC-3 by GenevaLunch
Conference is 31 August – 4 September 2009
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Geneva is home this week to a key global conference on how the world can adapt to climate change – disasters such as floods and hurricanes, but also the more subtle changes that affect agriculture, tourism and daily life.
The conference agenda is wide-ranging and includes improvements to early warning systems for disasters and how to provide more precise and more localized weather forecasting, needed by developing countries as well as industries in the developed world.
The meeting is hosted by Switzerland and organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and a group of partners.
US President Obama denied Western meddling in Iranian affairs yesterday 23 June, and UN Secretary general Ban Ki-moon called on Iran to respect the will of the people. The UK expelled two Iranian diplomats after Iran expelled two British ones. Several Western news organizations are noting that they are severely restricted in their ability to report the news from Iran.
People are taking to the rooftops at night to shout Alahu Akbar (God is great) in defiance, as the daily protests in Teheran and other Iranian cities die down after unprecedented police repression. The street protests have included clerics as well as many women who have been beaten and, in one celebrated case, shot.
Iran’s Guardian Council, the country’s supreme arbiter of the elections, refused to consider new elections, saying that the irregularities reported were insignificant and would not change the outcome of the disputed 12 June election, although Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameini, later allowed five extra days to examine charges of fraud. One of the losing candidates, Mehdi Karroubi, strongly criticized the state-run media, and called for a day of mourning Thursday 25 June. A leading critic of the regime, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri has also called for three days of national mourning for those killed in the protests. BBC, CNN, Reuters
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has rejected claims that the UN had purposefully withheld casualty figures in the final phase of Sri Lanka’s war against the Tamil Tigers. “I categorically reject – repeat, categorically – any suggestion that the United Nations has deliberately underestimated any figures,” he said in a speech to the General Assembly Monday 1 June. The rebuttal comes after claims made last week by France’s Le Monde newspaper that the UN under-reported figures of civilian deaths in order to maintain a presence in the country. Reuters
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – World headlines about endless casualties and aid organizations being kept out of Sri Lanka’s conflict area have died away, last week’s news, but the battle to find out what really happened and how many died may be only beginning, media reports 29 May show. Le Temps and Le Monde jointly carry an article by reporter Philippe Bolopion in Colombo that accuses the Sri Lankan government of hiding the real number of deaths and the UN of collusion out of fear that its ability to work in the country would be compromised. In the UK, The Times front-page story Friday 29 May says that 20,000 civilians – three times the official number – were killed.
The Times story is based on photos taken on the beaches in the conflict area, UN documents as well as “witness accounts and expert testimony.” The numbers are in fact the same as those published a day earlier by Le Monde, which also cites UN sources. The photos were taken for The Times. Le Monde refers to satellite images taken by Unosat of the conflict area, which reportedly show shelling damage, possibly after the date when the Sri Lankan government said it had stopped.
In Geneva Wednesday 28 the Human Rights Council, an independent inter-UN organization, rejected a Swiss-European draft resolution to investigate possible war crimes in Sri Lanka and instead adopted a Sri Lankan counter-resolution. Human Rights Watch condemned the UNHRC move, saying it had “passed a deeply flawed resolution on Sri Lanka that ignores calls for an international investigation into alleged abuses during recent fighting and other pressing human rights concerns.”
The WHO World Health Assembly is meeting in Geneva, Switzerland 18-22 May 2009
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Widespread uncertainty concerning the A/H1N1 virus and its so far relatively mild symptoms are complicating the decision-making process about vaccine production. The debate has been a major focal point at the World Health Assembly, the annual meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, 18-22 May.
Un Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon intends to set up a special commission of inquiry to investigate the death of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, says a spokeswoman in New York, according to CNN. He is on his first official visit to the country. Bhutto headed the opposition party in Pakistan when she was killed by a bomb explosion in December 2007, after she had warned President Musharraf that four members of his government were plotting her death. Musharraf was ousted in February 2008 elections.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon Wednesday called for $7 billion dollars in aid to help 30 million people in more than 31 countries, as part of the Humanitarian Appeal 2009, making this the largest such appeal to private and public donors since 360 aid agencies, including UN organizations, began to coordinate their efforts in 1991in an annual, consolidated appeal.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Climate change and the achievement of the Millenium Development Goals (MDG), were the topics of conversation during the first visit of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to the World Intellectual Property (Wipo) headquarters in Geneva.
DR Congo leader Joseph Kabila and Rwandan leader Paul Kagame are meeting in Nairobi, Kenya with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in hopes of keeping the fighting in DR Congo, which is intensifying, from spreading into a regional conflict. BBC
Geneva, Switzerland (TSR, Fre) – Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations director general, is making his first visits to the UN’s European office in Geneva, Friday and Saturday. He took office at the start of the year, replacing Kofi Annan, who is now retired in Geneva. Meetings with top Geneva-based staff and the director general take place as a rule every six months. The UN leader and
