A viable climate change agreement was achievable before the critical Copenhagen meeting in December, but with only 200 days left, progress must accelerate, Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said at a Headquarters press conference today.
In progress at UNHQ
Press Conference
The convergence of the global food, fuel, financial and economic crises, against a backdrop of climate change, presented an unprecedented opportunity for action to reshape the development agenda and should not be wasted, Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, said at a Headquarters press conference today.
Stressing that only 1 to 2 per cent of the millions of human trafficking victims were rescued every year, Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), implored Member States this afternoon to do a better job of combating the scourge.
A draft global plan of action to prevent trafficking in persons was not a panacea, but a “practical tool to further efforts in a focused way to achieve results”, Andrei Dapkiunas, Permanent Representative of Belarus to the United Nations, said today as he shed light on efforts to create a comprehensive United Nation strategy to address human trafficking.
Responding to a 13 May deadline set by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, some 69 countries filed claims to oceanic territories along their coast for an area extending 200 nautical miles from shore, said Hariharan Pakshi Rajan, Secretary of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.
The 18 newly elected members of the Human Rights Council would need to prove themselves by implementing the international human rights agenda at home and abroad, Craig Mokhiber, Deputy Director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said during a Headquarters news conference this afternoon.
The ministerial meeting of the Security Council on the Middle East that took place today was critical in reaffirming a common position on the peace process after the Gaza crisis and Israeli elections, Sergey Lavrov, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, said today at a Headquarters press conference.
“This is a moment that requires audacity”, President of the General Assembly Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, of Nicaragua, said today, as he discussed the draft outcome document for the Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development, to be held in New York from 1 to 3 June 2009.
Senior advisers to the President of the General Assembly yesterday sounded a call to African nations to participate in next month’s high-level economic summit, as a way to make up for their absence at the creation of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944.
Seven months ahead of the deadline on a new international climate change agreement, Connie Hedegaard, Minister for Climate and Energy of Denmark, was in New York to press Governments to prepare for complex negotiations on an “ambitious and truly global deal”, scheduled for December in the Danish capital.