Security Council

The following Security Council press statement was issued today by Council President Matthew Rycroft (United Kingdom):

The Security Council determined today that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/Sham (ISIL/ISIS) constituted an “unprecedented” threat to international peace and security, calling upon Member States with the requisite capacity to take “all necessary measures” to prevent and suppress its terrorist acts on territory under its control in Syria and Iraq.

The following Security Council press statement was issued today by Council President Matthew Rycroft (United Kingdom):

Leaders in Serbia and Kosovo must continue to show “far-sighted” commitment to overcome fresh political turbulence that threatened to set back recent hard-won agreements aimed at normalizing relations, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative told the Security Council today.

The following Security Council press statement was issued today by Council President Matthew Rycroft (United Kingdom):

The abhorrent terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula reinforced the reality that the extremism and terrorism infecting many parts of the Middle East was not constrained by borders, and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could not be separated from the global threat of terrorism, the Secretary-General’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process told the Security Council this morning.

Today’s violent conflicts, most recently marked by terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut and Baghdad, were often rooted in a mix of exclusion, inequality and governance failures, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council today, urging a greater focus on prevention, human rights and coherence among all actors to address problems which, when allowed to fester, led to large-scale atrocity.

As the international community approached a critical juncture in the five-year-long Syrian crisis, its focus must remain on protecting civilians and ensuring they enjoyed unimpeded access to humanitarian aid, senior United Nations officials emphasized as they briefed the Security Council today.

The Security Council requested today that the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals present, by Friday, 20 November, its report on the progress of work in its initial four-year period, and that the related informal working group examine that report, so that a mandated review of the Mechanism would be complete by 21 December.

United Nations Police were often viewed by local communities as the face of the Organization’s peacekeeping operations and contributed significantly to unarmed protection activities, Hervé Ladsous, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, told the Security Council today as it considered the challenges of policing under a mandate to protect civilians.