Press Conference

A diplomatic strategy by countries supporting the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) was urgently needed to persuade and pressure the nine remaining States required to ratify the treaty so it could enter into force, Jessica Matthews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, said at Headquarters today.

An emerging new world was moving towards multipolarity after the collapse of cold war bipolarity and the failed attempt to impose unipolarity, President Hugo Chávez Frías of Venezuela said at Headquarters today.

Yesterday’s Climate Summit at United Nations Headquarters had achieved the Secretary-General’s goal of mobilizing political will at the highest level and focusing the attention of Heads of State and Government on the urgent need for action, Robert Orr, Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Planning, said today.

The sixty-fourth session of the United Nations General Assembly faced three main challenges whose outcome would shape the international community’s response to the major issues on its agenda, Spain’s Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, said today.

There was broad consensus that the challenges of climate change could not be met without dealing with deforestation, Special Envoy of Papua New Guinea for Environment and Climate Change, Kevin Conrad, told correspondents at Headquarters after a high-level event on the topic concluded this afternoon.

Failing to respond to Somalia’s increased need would result in a “future of miserable destitution” and could tip the region into a far greater level of crisis, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Somalia said today.

Following is a transcript of the joint press conference by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Denmark’s Prime Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, held in New York today, 22 September:

The Government of Denmark had embarked on ground-breaking initiatives aimed at opening up debate to citizens of the world in the lead-up to and during the course of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December, Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said today at Headquarters.

Middle East Quartet Special Envoy Tony Blair, along with Norway’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, briefed correspondents today at Headquarters on the work of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, and the status of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

“We are well beyond the sweeping rhetoric of embedded positions and well into discussion of solutions,” János Pásztor, Director of the Secretary-General’s Climate Change Support Team, said at a Headquarters press conference today.