The Deputy Secretary-General will deliver the Sorensen Lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations this afternoon, and he intends to talk about the recent plenary session of the General Assembly and what was achieved there. That lecture will be webcast on the Council of Foreign Relations website.
In progress at UNHQ
Noon Briefings
Arriving in Hungary, the Secretary-General attended the Budapest Water Summit where he informed attendees that by 2030 nearly half the world would be facing water scarcity. He called for full engagement of all stakeholders, in particular the business world, towards guaranteeing a water-secure world. He also met with Hungary’s President and Prime Minister.
The 15 members of the Security Council are in Kampala, Uganda, today, as part of their visit to the Great Lakes region of Africa. And about now, they are meeting President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. Earlier today, they were in Rwanda, where they met President Paul Kagame in Kigali. The delegation will arrive later today in Addis Ababa, and that will be the last leg of the visit.
The 15 members of the Security Council are expected to arrive later today in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the first leg of a five-day visit to the Great Lakes region of Africa. The delegation stopped in Brussels, where it met with the Political and Security Committee of the European Union.
At a major meeting on international migration, the Secretary-General offered condolences to the many African migrants who died in the Mediterranean after their ship sank. Stressing that the incident emphasized the issue’s importance, he said that the international community should take the tragedy as “another spur to action”.
The Security Council, in a presidential statement today, stressed that the magnitude of the humanitarian tragedy in Syria requires prompt action for the safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance in the whole country. It urged immediate steps to expand relief operations and lift bureaucratic obstacles.
A team from the United Nations and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has arrived in Damascus, following endorsement by the OPCW and Security Council of a plan to oversee destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons. Initial efforts will focus on verifying information provided by Syrian authorities.
The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Iraq has expressed his shock at the series of car bomb explosions that hit the city of Erbil yesterday and caused a number of casualties. He urged regional and national authorities to ensure that those responsible will be brought to justice.
The Secretary-General is deeply concerned by the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which state that human influence on the climate system is now evident in most regions and that it is extremely likely that that has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century.
The Secretary-General today welcomed the judgment by the Appeals Chamber of the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the case of Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former President, calling it a milestone in international criminal justice and a historic and momentous day for the people of Sierra Leone and the region.