With the scale and complexity of United Nations peacekeeping operations increasing dramatically over the past decade, new and innovative approaches to disarmament, demobilization and reintegration — driven more by practitioners in the field and their local partners than by diplomats in New York — were beginning to make a difference on the ground, a senior peacekeeping official said today.
In progress at UNHQ
Press Conference
At a Headquarters press conference today, the General Assembly President elect for the sixty-fifth session, Joseph Deiss ( Switzerland), said that the priorities of his tenure would be global and environmental governance, human rights, the environment and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.
With more than 13,000 police officers serving in peacekeeping operations — from Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region to earthquake-ravaged Haiti — the world body aimed to boost the number of women officers to 20 per cent by 2014 while strengthening training programmes to better prepare recruits to handle complex post-conflict and post-disaster situations, United Nations Police Adviser Ann-Marie Orler said at Headquarters today.
A coalition of States working to end piracy and armed robbery off the Somali Coast held its sixth meeting today at United Nations Headquarters and briefed correspondents afterward on the operational challenges they were facing, among them the vast distances of ocean that needed protecting and the lack of legal capacity among most countries of the region.
Specific means of tracing small conventional arms and eradicating the illicit cross-border trade in them will be the focus of a Headquarters meeting next week, its designated Chairperson told correspondents at Headquarters this afternoon. Pablo Macedo of Mexico told journalists that the Fourth Biennial Meeting of States on Small Arms and Light Weapons, to be held 14-18 June, will review implementation of the 2001 Programme of Action on the illicit trade of those armaments.
The world had become “marginally less peaceful”, in the last 12 months, Clyde McConaghy, a Board Member of the Institute for Economics and Peace, said today at a Headquarters press conference on the results of the Global Peace Index for 2010. Highlighting key findings of the Index, he said internal country indicators, such as the likelihood of violent demonstrations, homicide rates and perceptions of criminality within society, were major drivers that created a less peaceful world.
The head of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS said today that, while the number of people in low- and middle-income countries that had gained access to antiretroviral therapy had increased by 10-fold in the past five years, a “prevention revolution” was needed to ensure more targeted prevention measures and provide broader access to treatment — especially for women and at-risk groups.
The world had already consumed 90 per cent of the global stock of large fish on the high seas — a third of it caught by illegal, unregulated and unreported vessels, according to marine experts and legal scholars who spoke at a Headquarters press conference today as the United Nations kicked off the second annual World Oceans Day.
The diplomat overseeing negotiations on reforming the United Nations Security Council said today that since Member States finally had a text reflecting “all positions”, he was optimistic that talks on the issue would be more focused and the nettlesome process, ongoing for more than 15 years, could finally be concluded.
Stemming violence, boosting aid and building local capacity remained critical for the populations of Chad and Sudan, John Holmes, Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, said today at Headquarters following his return from a mission to the two African countries.