DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY THE OFFICE OF THE SPOKESMAN FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

DAILY PRESS BRIEFING BY THE OFFICE OF THE SPOKESMAN FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

Following is a near-verbatim transcript of today’s noon briefing by Fred Eckhard, Spokesman for the Secretary-General.

Good afternoon.

**Secretary-General

As you may or may not know, the Secretary-General is going to start a vacation this weekend.  He will be gone for a few weeks, and all of us will breathe easier.

** Iraq

The Secretary-General, in his third report to the Security Council on the work of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), says that staff security remains the overriding constraint for all UN activity in Iraq.  In recent months, the acting UN Security Coordinator assessed the risk to UN personnel in Iraq as being in the high to critical category, and the UN Mission and UN agencies will, therefore, continue to limit their activities inside Iraq to the essential ones.

The Secretary-General says that the primary task of his new Special Representative for Iraq, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, will be to assist the Iraqis in implementing the proposed transitional timetable leading to the establishment of a constitutionally elected government by 31 December 2005.  To this end, he will work closely with the Iraqi authorities, political entities and civil society.

The Security Council has scheduled consultations next Wednesday to discuss the UN Mission in Iraq.

**Sudan

The agreement reached on Wednesday night between the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Sudan Jan Pronk and the Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail has now been finalized by the Sudanese Government.  As we reported yesterday, the agreement details steps to be taken in the next 30 days to begin to disarm the Janjaweed militia and other outlaw groups, improve security in Darfur and address the humanitarian crisis.

A formal copy will be signed by Mr. Pronk and the Foreign Minister and officially issued on Monday.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) says that it hopes to have deployed eight observers to the three regions of Darfur, as well as in Khartoum, in the next few days.  Two will remain in Khartoum to carry out liaison work with the Government, while two observers will go to each of the three regions.

Available on the High Commissioner’s Web site is the final report by the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Asma Jahangir, on her recent visit to Darfur.  In it, she says that she finds that it is beyond doubt that the Government of the Sudan is responsible for extrajudicial and summary executions of large numbers of people over the last several months in the Darfur region.  Jahangir says the Government is also responsible for executions in the ShilookKingdom in UpperNileState, though on a lesser scale.

**Robert Orr

The Secretary-General today announced the appointment of Robert Orr of the United States as the new Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination and Strategic Planning in the Secretary-General’s Executive Office.  That post was previously held by Michael Doyle, also from the United States.

Dr. Orr comes to the United Nations from HarvardUniversity, where he served as Executive Director of the BelferCenter for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government.  Before that, he served as Director of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. He has also served a number of senior posts in the US Government, including a posting as Deputy to the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke.

We have his bio data available upstairs.

**Security Council

There are no Security Council meetings or consultations scheduled for today.

Yesterday afternoon, the Council issued a presidential statement on Côte d’Ivoire, in which it urged all the parties which signed the Accra Agreement to implement, in good faith, without delays or preconditions, the obligations they have undertaken as part of the agreement.

In particular, the Council called upon them to uphold the commitments so that incontestable elections can be held, as agreed, before the end of 2005.  It reaffirmed its complete readiness to take any appropriate measure against individuals who impede the full implementation of the Linas-Marcoussis Agreements.

**Burundi – Congolese Refugees

The UN refugee agency, or UNHCR, has begun relocating some of the
20,000 refugees who fled fighting in the South Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in June of this year.  Earlier this week 139 refugees were taken to a camp in north-east Burundi which already hosts some 8,000 Congolese who fled the fighting in previous years.

Most of the recently arrived refugees, who are currently crammed in three transit centres along Burundi’s volatile border with the DRC, will be taken to a better and safer location away from the border, once UNHCR and the Burundian Government agree on a suitable site.

The refugee agency is urging the Burundian Government to keep its border with the DRC open so that refugees can return if they want to, and also to allow any Congolese to seek refuge in Burundi if they feel the need to do so.  Over the past few weeks, border crossings have been subject to intermittent closures for security reasons.  We have more on that in a press release.

**Liberia

In Liberia today, Special Representative Jacques Klein launched a vocational training project, to teach some 640 former combatants skills in housing construction and building trades.  Klein told the former combatants, in the town of Cheesemanburg, “Make the best use of this programme, as it has the potential to transform your lives”.  We have a press release with more.

**International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Available on the racks today is an exchange of letters between the Secretary-General and the Security Council, concerning the appointment of Judge Asoka da Silva as a permanent judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.  Da Silva will serve out the remainder of the term of office of another Sri Lankan judge, who stepped down for health reasons, and it will last until 24 May 2007.

**Hiroshima Anniversary

The Secretary-General today marked the fifty-ninth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by urging us all to renew the vow that the horrors experienced by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will never be repeated.  He voiced the hope that next year’s review conference for the Non-Proliferation Treaty will not only reconfirm the undertaking made by the nuclear weapons States to eliminate nuclear weapons totally, but will turn those words into deeds.  We have this message upstairs.

**UNESCO

UNESCO has condemned the murder of a Filipino journalist –- the third in the Philippines this year.  Roger Mariano, a broadcaster, was shot dead on 31 July by unknown assailants.  UNESCO says it’s essential that those responsible be brought to justice.

We have a press release on that upstairs, and we have The Week Ahead for you.  Judging from the size of it, it looks like it will be a quiet week.

**Questions and Answers

Question:  Do you have any idea why the agreement between the UN and Sudan is not going to be released until Monday?

Spokesman:  No, we got this information just a few minutes before the start of the briefing, so I did not get an explanation why.  But I assume that once it is signed on Monday, then the text will be made available to you.

Question:  This may be a development you have not heard of yet, but I wonder if the UN will have any comment on an Indonesian appeals court today overturning convictions of four security officers, including three army officers and one policeman, for crimes against humanity during the massacres in 1999.  There is comment from people criticizing the court, saying it did not use correctly the evidence that the United Nations supplied them with to back up the charges.  There are also human rights groups saying the UN should now call for its own international tribunal.  I imagine you are hearing this for the first time, but could I ask if you could see if the United Nations will have any comment on this?

Spokesman: Yes.

Thank you very much. Have a good weekend and enjoy the cool weather as long as it lasts.

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