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.

Good afternoon.

**Consolidated Appeal Launch

A short while ago, the Secretary-General launched the annual consolidated humanitarian appeal.  This year he called for 3 billion dollars to cover the needs of tens of millions of people in 21 countries.

These are real people with real needs, he said.  He added this is not charity; as victims of man-made and natural disasters, they have a right to the fulfilment of their basic rights.

Wealthy nations, he said, understand their responsibilities to help people in need and to uphold people’s rights.  He added that richer countries also perceive assistance to those in need as an investment in security.  He told the audience that a “world where, amid increasing global prosperity, millions still live in desperate conditions, will not be a world at peace”.

Funding levels for different countries have varied, the Secretary-General said.  Recent appeals for Iraq were fulfilled over 90 per cent –- close to 2 billion dollars, while appeals for Liberia and Burundi only received about a quarter of what was needed.  We must do better, he said.

The full text of his speech is available upstairs, as is a press kit on this event.

Also speaking at today’s ceremony in the Economic and Social Council were, among others, the UN’s chief humanitarian officer, Jan Egeland, and the head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Mark Malloch Brown, both of whom will be joining us shortly as guests at this briefing.

As you may know, the Humanitarian Appeal 2004 is a product of the Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP), a United Nations-led mechanism created a decade ago by the United Nations General Assembly to ensure strategic and coordinated humanitarian responses to crises.  The appeal is managed by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for the benefit of the UN humanitarian agencies, and non-governmental and Red Cross partner organizations.

**Security Council

The Security Council is holding a private meeting on Guinea-Bissau.

The Secretary-General was present to open the session.

In addition to President Henrique Perreira Rosa of Guinea-Bissau, the President of the Economic and Social Council, Gert Rosenthal, the representative of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Nana Akufo Addo, as well as Henrique Valle, representative of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries, are briefing the Council members.

David Stephen, the Representative of the Secretary-General in Guinea-Bissau will also speak.

President Rosa and David Stephen will be coming here to brief you following the Council meeting, and after our briefing.

**Security Council -- Other

Yesterday afternoon during consultations, Security Council members received a revised draft resolution on the Middle East “Road Map”.

Members of the Security Council issued a press statement on Afghanistan, saying that the weekend murder of the UNHCR worker was a cowardly act by those who wish to undermine the efforts of the international community to assist the Afghan people in creating a peaceful and stable Afghanistan.

Council members called on the Afghan authorities to make every effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of this crime.

**Afghanistan

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees announced today the temporary suspension of the agency’s assistance to Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan.  That decision follows the murder on Sunday of UNHCR staff member Bettina Goislard in the south-eastern Afghan city of Ghazni.

Filippo Grandi, UNHCR’s chief of mission for Afghanistan, said that the agency would temporarily reduce its staff in eastern and southern Afghanistan, withdrawing 30 international staff from the border area and closing refugee reception centres in the provinces of Nangarhar, Paktia, Khost and Kandahar.  UNHCR will review the situation after two weeks.

He added, “If reconstruction of the country is to continue, governments must consider more seriously helping Afghanistan achieve security and stability.  We cannot do this alone.  This murder tragically proved it”, he said.

We have a press release with more details.

**Sudan

The latest humanitarian update on Sudan says that “current optimism” for a peace agreement between the Government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army has raised expectations of the people of the Sudan, and has made support to the Sudan more important than ever.

The update notes that the humanitarian appeal for the Sudan will be launched in Brussels tomorrow.  It requests more than $450 million targeting more than 3.5 million Sudanese people.

**Western Sahara

Alvaro de Soto, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Western Sahara, continues his initial round of consultations with the parties and neighbouring governments.

He is in Algiers, having met the leadership of the POLISARIO Front in Rabouni on Sunday.  (He had met with Moroccan government officials at the end of last week).  He met the Algerian Delegate for Foreign Affairs, Abdelkader Messahel this morning.  Mr. de Soto hopes to visit Nouakchott, Mauritania, next week.

**International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia yesterday confirmed the indictment of Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, whom it accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Tribunal says that Babic helped to remove forcibly, deport or kill virtually the entire non-Serb population of Croatia’s Krajina region.

Judge Theodor Meron, of the United States, was re-elected yesterday as the President of the Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, while Judge Fausto Pocar of Italy was re-elected as his Vice-President.

We put out a press release yesterday afternoon with more details.

**UNICEF:  Gates Foundation Grant

UNICEF has received a 10 million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fight maternal and neonatal tetanus, a major killer of newborns and their mothers.

According to a news note released by UNICEF last night, in the poorest and most remote areas of the world, this disease kills an estimated 230,000 mothers and babies annually.  The vaccine to eliminate these needless deaths costs just one dollar and twenty cents per woman.

The news note is available upstairs.

**Budget

On budget news, the United States made a large payment today to the UN regular budget, amounting to nearly $182 million.

That amount is enough to cover their arrears for prior years and to include a partial payment for this year’s dues.

**World Chronicle Programme

And DPI has asked me to announce that the World Chronicle Programme No. 915 with Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs (who was here just a minute ago and will be coming up shortly), will be shown today at 4 p.m. on in-house television channels 3 or 31.

That’s all I have for you, any questions before we go to Michele on the General Assembly.

Michele it’s all yours...

Questions and Answers

Question:  Fred, what is the rationale of UNHCR to close the distribution centre over there?

Spokesman for the Secretary-General:  Security.  I think, in one word, it’s security.

Question:  But every time we have somebody killed we close the mission, are we not working against us?  Because I was reading the report of the mission led by the Ambassador of Germany (inaudible) this is precisely what he said, and we are closing mission after mission every time that we have a problem.  The rationale, are we working for the U.S. people or are we working for the security of staff?

Spokesman:  I’m sorry.  We are not going to risk the lives of our people to carry out humanitarian programmes when there is a direct threat against them.  This is new -- direct threats against international aid workers.  This woman was shot at close range by two men on a motorcycle when she was in her vehicle.  Now maybe if we can get our humanitarian workers driving around in hard-skinned vehicles, maybe taking other precautions, they can reintroduce their staff.  But for the moment, in the wake of the attack of the weekend, our people are just too vulnerable to allow them to continue their work normally.  The natural thing is you shut down, pull back, reassess and decide how you can go forward afterwards.  Michele?

Spokeswoman for General Assembly President

Thank you, Fred, good afternoon.

The President of the General Assembly, Julian Hunte issued a statement last night where he condemns in the strongest terms the murder Sunday night of an international humanitarian worker in Afghanistan.

President Hunte expresses once more his grave concern about the security of United Nations personnel.  “We are greatly concerned that international humanitarian workers are becoming increasingly the target of violence and terrorism”, he said.

President Hunte said, “Bettina Goislard, the 29-year-old French national working for UNHCR was travelling in a clearly marked agency vehicle when she was killed on Sunday.  Ms. Goislard’s murder has forced UNHCR to temporarily close down three more of its offices in southern and south-east Afghanistan affecting refugee operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the lives of tens of thousands Afghan returnees.”

The President of the General Assembly conveys his heartfelt condolences to the family of Bettina Goislard, her colleagues in Afghanistan and to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The General Assembly met this morning in open-ended informal consultations around the revitalization of the work of the General Assembly.  A second working paper is putting forth two clusters of issues -– enhancing the role and authority of the General Assembly and improving its working methods.

On the substantive issues, the Member States are to continue discussing, one, the central position of the General Assembly as the chief deliberative policy-making and representative organ of the United Nations and the need to take the action necessary to enable it to carry out its responsibilities more effectively.  Second, the relationship between the General Assembly and the Security Council, including areas of complementarity between the two organs; the relationship between the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and other principal organs of the General Assembly; the role of the Presidency of the Assembly including his relationship to other organs and entities of the United Nations system.

Also considered are strengthening the office of the President, advocacy measures that should be taken in respect of the work and decisions of the Assembly, so that they could be more widely known; action that might be taken at the national, regional and international level, for the implementation of resolutions and decisions of the General Assembly, and finally, ensuring democratic decision-making.

The President has appointed six facilitators to assist him in the revitalization exercise.  They are:  Abdallah Baali, Permanent Representative of Algeria; Stafford O. Neil, Permanent Representative of Jamaica; Dirk Jan van den Berg, Permanent Representative of the Netherlands; Kishore Mahbubani, Permanent Representative of Singapore; Roman Kirn, Permanent Representative of Slovenia, and Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo, Permanent Representative of South Africa.  They will lead the consultation on each item in the next three weeks.  The President has indicated that he would present a resolution on revitalization of the work of the General Assembly before the substantive part of the fifty-eighth session concludes in December 2003.

This is all I have for you today, thank you.

Spokesman for the Secretary-General:  Any questions?  If not, I’ll ask Jan and Mark to come up and will talk about the consolidated appeal.

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