Noon Briefings

The General Assembly voted today on the five incoming members of the Security Council for two-year terms beginning in January 2011. The incoming members will replace Austria, Japan, Mexico, Turkey and Uganda, whose two-year terms expire at the end of this year. The new elected members are Colombia, Germany, India, Portugal and South Africa.

The Security Council is just back from its mission to Sudan where ambassadors visited Juba, El Fasher and Khartoum last week. Speaking from Khartoum on Saturday, United Kingdom Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant affirmed that the Council remains concerned about conflict in Sudan and the continuing risks to peace and security there.

The Security Council delegation to Uganda and Sudan began its day in El Fasher, meeting with the Wali of North Darfur. At the start of the meeting, the Council's leader for this part of the mission, United Kingdom Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, expressed the Security Council's concern over increased levels of violence, the protection of civilians, sexual violence and the illegal flow of weapons.

Wrapping up a two-day visit to Nepal, the Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, B. Lynn Pascoe, said that the final months of the United Nations Mission in Nepal’s mandate represented “100 days of opportunity” before the peace process enters a new phase. Pascoe told journalists that priority should now be on the resolution of the Maoist integration and rehabilitation process.

The Secretary-General chaired the Third Global Fund Replenishment Conference this morning, telling participants that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has been one of the major success stories of the twenty-first century. He said the programmes supported by the Global Fund have saved an estimated 5.7 million lives.

The head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, called on Governments today to accelerate their search for common ground, ahead of the Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico. She said that with less than two months left, a concrete outcome in December was urgently needed to restore faith in the ability of States Parties to take the negotiations forward.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights released a 550-page report today, listing 617 of the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law over a 10-year period by both State and non-State actors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. High Commissioner Navi Pillay says the report “provides the most extensive account to date of the most serious violations committed between 1993 and 2003.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in its latest report on Afghanistan, says that opium poppy cultivation there remained as last year, but the production of opium was cut by half in 2010. The decrease was largely due to a plant infection hitting the major poppy-crop growing provinces of Helmand and Kandahar particularly hard.

Staffan de Mistura, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, told the Security Council this morning that events in recent months, including the July Kabul Conference and this month’s legislative elections, have been crucial for the country’s transition.

The Security Council heard a briefing this morning from Michael von der Schulenburg, the Secretary-General’s Executive Representative for Sierra Leone. He discussed preparations for the 2012 elections, and also noted the apprehension with which Sierra Leoneans view developments in neighbouring Guinea. Council members also heard an update on Côte d’Ivoire by the Special Representative for the country, Choi Young-jin.