DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY THE OFFICE OF THE SPOKESMAN FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL AND THE SPOKESWOMAN FOR THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY PRESIDENT

Following is a near-verbatim transcript of today’s noon briefing by Fred Eckhard, Spokesman for the Secretary-General, and Michele Montas, Spokeswoman for the General Assembly President.

Spokesman for Secretary-General

Good Afternoon.

**Memorials

Tomorrow afternoon, at 4 p.m., the United Nations is holding a memorial ceremony in the General Assembly Hall to honour all those who died or were injured in the bombing of the UN Headquarters in Baghdad one month earlier.  The Secretary-General will speak at that ceremony, which will also include a candle lighting involving the family members of the staff who died.

Then at 7 p.m., also in the General Assembly Hall, Brazilian musician and Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil will perform an hour-long concert in honour of those who lost their lives in the 19 August attack.  He is also going to give a press conference in this room just a few minutes from now, at 12:30 p.m.

Attendance at the two ceremonies will be by ticket only.  I’ve been told that the Media Accreditation Office has 50 tickets for journalists for the concert, and 10 tickets only for the memorial service, and they can be picked up on a first come first serve basis.  The events, however, will also be broadcast live on UN Television.

**Security Council

There are no meetings or consultations of the Security Council today.

At 3:30 this afternoon, the Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee is scheduled to meet in Conference Room 7.

And tomorrow, the Council has scheduled three consecutive open meetings, one on the UN Mission in Sierra Leone, one on Liberia and one on its annual report.  Also on the agenda for tomorrow are consultations on the “oil-for-food” programme for Iraq.

**Ethiopia-Eritrea

At the nineteenth Military Coordination Commission (MCC) Meeting held in Nairobi, Kenya, the Force Commander of the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), Major General Robert Gordon, reminded the delegations from the two countries that the importance of the Commission meetings would increase as the physical demarcation of the border draws closer.  We have a press release with more details.

**Zimbabwe - Humanitarian

We also have a humanitarian update on Zimbabwe.

According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UN agencies such as the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization are stepping up operations to address food shortages and their underlying causes.

The United Nations has also identified the need to strengthen a national immunization programme, which has been affected by the country’s economic downturn.

**AIDS

I’d like to give you a heads-up for next Monday’s events, when more than 130 Member States are inscribed so far to speak at the General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on AIDS, where they are to review progress since the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS was adopted in 2001.  The plenary is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. and may go beyond midnight.  Is that your understanding too? (To General Assembly President Spokeswoman).

The Secretary-General and Dr. Peter Piot, the Executive Director of the Joint UN Programme against HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), will present new progress reports on efforts to fight the epidemic at the country level.

We have available today at the documents counter press kits for the Monday events, including copies of the UNAIDS report, which is embargoed until

10:30 a.m. on Monday.

Among the many events scheduled for that day, I’d like to draw your attention to a panel on the Media and AIDS that will take place from 1 to 3 p.m. in the Dag Hammarskjöld Auditorium, and which will be moderated by UN Development Programme, that is UNDP, Administrator Mark Malloch Brown and Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information Shashi Tharoor.

**UNICEF

Finally on my plate here, the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, today published a new report on Child Maltreatment in Rich Nations.  According to this first comparative research ever done on the subject, almost 3,500 children under the age of 15 die every year from physical abuse and neglect in developed nations.

Numbers also indicate that the greatest risk is among younger children and that a small group of countries -– Greece, Italy, Ireland, Norway and Spain –- appear to have an exceptionally low incidence of child maltreatment death.  Belgium, the Czech Republic, New Zealand, Hungary and France, however, reach levels that are four to six times higher, whereas the United States, Mexico and Portugal are at the top of the league with rates that are between 10 and

15 times higher.

According to UNICEF, factors such as poverty, stress and drug and alcohol abuse are clearly linked with the thousands of children who die each year from violence in their homes, schools and communities.  You can pick up the press release with full details on that story.

Any questions before we go to Michele?  Michele, welcome.

Spokeswoman for General Assembly President

Thank you Fred and good afternoon.

I have been receiving a number of phone calls on the emergency meeting of the General Assembly tomorrow.  I can confirm that the General Assembly, it’s in the journal, will resume, Friday afternoon, its tenth emergency special session on Palestine.  The request came yesterday to the President of the General Assembly from the Permanent Representative of the Republic of the Sudan, who is Chairman of the Arab Group for the month of September.  In that letter, the States members of the Arab League request the resumption of the tenth emergency special session of the General Assembly on Palestine.  I quote the letter addressed to President Hunte:

“Pursuant to paragraph 8 of General Assembly resolution of ES-10/11 of 5 August 2002, adopted at its resumed tenth emergency special session, I have the honour to request the resumption of the tenth emergency special session of the General Assembly in light of the inability of the Security Council to fulfil its responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security due to the exercise by one of its permanent members of the veto.”  This is the end of the quote.  This request was supported by the Non-Aligned Movement later yesterday in another letter sent to the President of the Assembly.  Both letters are available on the racks.

The letter from the Permanent Representative of Sudan refers to General Assembly Resolution passed by the GA on, I quote, “illegal Israeli actions in occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory” at its most recent Tenth Emergency Special Session that was on 5 August 2002.  The resolution that was adopted that day contains a trigger in operative paragraph 8 for the resumption of the Session, and it reads as follows:

“Decidesto adjourn the tenth emergency special session temporarily and to authorize the President of the General Assembly at its most recent session to resume its meetings upon request from Member States.”

The formal basis for holding an emergency special session, as you know, is contained in Resolution 377A(V) adopted by the General Assembly on 5 November 1950 and in the Rules of Procedure of the General Assembly as amended.

I have got a lot of questions on this.  The resolution of 1950, known as the “Uniting for peace” formula, resolves that “if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, in cases where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures”.  So, then, this is the reason why the emergency session was called, it has to be called within 24 hours of the request by a majority of States.

The Assembly's tenth emergency special session to “consider illegal Israeli actions in occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory”, was first held in 1997, then 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002.  So it is resuming again, tomorrow, Friday afternoon.  The Assembly will meet in room 3 because of the special ceremony we have in the General Assembly Hall.

I would also like to say that tomorrow morning, the General Assembly will meet to discuss the allocation of the 158 items on the Agenda.

Tomorrow at 11 a.m., the President of the fifty-eighth session, Julian Hunte of Saint Lucia, will be holding his first press conference.  It will be here, in room 226, at 11 o’clock.

Thank you.

Spokesman for Secretary-General:  Any questions?  Yes, Debbie?

Questions and Answers

Question:  What time will the special session begin?

Spokeswoman for General Assembly President:  Three o’clock in the afternoon.

Question:  Is there a draft resolution or speakers’ list out for that yet?

Spokeswoman for General Assembly President:  Not yet.  But I think that the draft resolution will be pretty close to the resolution that was presented to the Security Council and that met with a veto.  This is what I understand.

Spokesman for the Secretary-General:  If there are no more questions, I thank you very much, see you tomorrow.

Question:  Do you have figures yet on the number of heads of State who are expected for the General Assembly to date?

Spokeswoman for General Assembly President:  So far we have... I think it is a hundred.  And I have the list here, but I don’t have the exact number.  I’ll get back to you on the exact number, because I think it was slightly modified by one or two recently.  So, I’ll get you the exact number.

Question:  And a second question on Liberia?  Are there any troops committed yet for a Liberia peacekeeping force?  Are there any formal commitments by any countries?

Spokesman for Secretary-General:  I don’t believe we discussed that process, while troops are being committed, but if you check the transcript of Jacques Klein’s press appearance here earlier this week, I think he did mention expressions of interest from a number of specific countries.

Thank you very much.

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