Press Conference

While many Governments were actively pursuing reforms to dismantle legal barriers holding back women’s empowerment, millions of women still faced an uphill battle in the struggle to undo negative stereotypes, lock down property rights and successfully confront sexual harassment in the workplace, the Chairperson of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women said today.

A year after the General Assembly’s adoption of a landmark resolution on the human right to water and sanitation, President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia appealed to the international community to ensure its availability to all as a public good, rather than a private commodity to be bought and sold.

President Alassane Ouattara of Côte d’Ivoire today sought to assure the international community that his topmost priority was not to punish or seek revenge against his opponents, but to strengthen State institutions, restore the rule of law, protect the human rights of all Ivorians without distinction, fight against impunity and ensure national reconciliation.

Fresh from addressing the Security Council, the commanders of four United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa and the Middle East addressed a Headquarters press conference today on their efforts to protect civilians in Darfur, address charges of human trafficking among senior peacekeepers in Liberia and, more generally, implement measures to ensure that troops everywhere were held to the highest standards of conduct.

Condemning Friday’s bombing in Oslo and the shooting massacre at a Norwegian summer camp, delegates and youth advocates said today that this week’s General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on Youth would aim to end such extremist behaviour and guide young people on a path of tolerance and understanding. “We are here to prevent what happened in Norway in the future,” Jean-Francis Zinsou (Benin), a co-facilitator of the Meeting, said at a Headquarters press conference.

In a wide-ranging press conference at Headquarters today, Michael Williams, United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon, assessed the progress and setbacks in the implementation of Security Council resolution 1701 (2006), saying that major issues — including the existence of arms outside State control, their use as a political instrument and Israel’s presence in the border village of Ghajar — must be tackled in order for Lebanon to exercise full sovereignty over its territory.

The United Nations today confirmed the existence of famine in two regions of southern Somalia: southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle, and made an urgent appeal for “exceptional efforts” to support Somalis in overcoming that humanitarian crisis, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, Mark Bowden, told correspondents today at a Headquarters press conference.

Given the serious nature of “preliminary findings of preliminary allegations” to be included in a United Nations report on human rights in Southern Kordofan, which was expected to be finalized in the next 10 to 14 days, mechanisms for monitoring human rights in that area must be agreed, now that the mandate of the United Nations Mission in the Sudan (UNMIS) had ended, a top human rights official said during a press conference at Headquarters today.

The Security Council’s adoption in June of resolutions 1988 (2011) and 1989 (2011), which split the Al-Qaida and Taliban sanctions regimes, had been a significant step forward in the capacity of the Office of the Ombudsperson for the Security Council’s “Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee” to deliver fairness, transparency and due process, correspondents heard today at a Headquarters press conference.

With pirates and the networks that supported them still outfoxing foreign naval patrols, kidnapping seafarers and disrupting shipping lanes, representatives of the diplomatic Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia today said that combating the scourge required scaled-up resources, enhanced land- and sea-based strategies and more political commitment on the part of the Somali Government.