Press Conference

Nobel Peace Prize winner from 2003 Shirin Ebadi said today that the international community should impose political sanctions and “make the world smaller” for violators of human rights, at a Headquarters press conference on the situation of human rights in Iran.

The Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, said today there was “a rapid increase” in child recruitment and gender-based violence in Somalia. Speaking on her recent trip to Somalia and Kenya at a Headquarters press conference, she highlighted developments in Somalia from meetings held with high-level State and United Nations officials, the African Union Mission in Somalia, non-governmental organizations and women and children.

Raising the $100 billion needed annually to help developing countries adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change would require a mix of new public sources, a scaling-up of existing public sources and more private flows, the Co-Chairs of an expert group charged with analysing options to meet that goal said today as they formally presented their findings to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

There had been tremendous advances all over the world since 1970, as indicated by the Human Development Index, with poor countries advancing the fastest, Jeni Klugman, lead author of the 2010 Human Development Report, said today at Headquarters, during a press conference to launch the document, entitled “The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development”.

Hollywood celebrities Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher joined with senior officials of the United Nations anti-crime agency this afternoon to appeal for support to a new fund to aid victims of human trafficking.

To help curb the growing number of people that call a slum their home, Governments must develop comprehensive urban policies that moved beyond the “megalopolis” to envelop villages, university towns and mid-size cities, the newly named Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN‑Habitat) told reporters at a Headquarters press conference today.

The centrepiece in the Security Council’s programme of work this month would be a ministerial meeting on the situation in the Sudan on 16 November, the current Council President, Mark Lyall Grant, Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom, told correspondents today at Headquarters. “It is critical that the Council retains a very close focus on Sudan in these critical months,” he said.

After nearly 20 years of negotiations, 193 Governments from around the world adopted an “historic” protocol to fairly share the planet’s genetic resources, and a 10-year plan to protect its rapidly disappearing biodiversity — developments that set a positive tone for upcoming negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, to reach a new global climate accord, Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity Secretariat, told journalists at a Headquarters press conference today.

Racism — a problem everywhere in the world — was growing due to xenophobic teachings and violence, and it was the duty of States to enforce internationally recognized standards to prevent discrimination, Githu Muigai, the United Nations top expert on contemporary forms of racism and xenophobia told correspondents today at a Headquarters press conference.

The counter-terrorism regime created by the Security Council was “outside the scope of its powers”, and while international terrorism remained a very serious threat and constituted an atrocious crime, it did not justify an exercise by the Security Council of supranational quasi-judicial sanctioning powers over individuals, said a United Nations human rights expert at a Headquarters press conference today