Nobel Laureate Jody Williams and Miguel Marin-Bosch, former Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations in Geneva, are among a list of distinguished keynote speakers attending the Sixty-Second Annual DPI/NGO Conference, which will take place in Mexico City from 9-11 September.

United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, Kiyo Akasaka, and Australian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, have jointly announced that the sixty-third United Nations Department of Public Information/Non-Governmental Organization (DPI/NGO) Conference will be held in Melbourne, Australia, from 30 August to 1 September 2010.

On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., speakers addressing the sixty-second annual DPI/NGO Conference in Mexico City on Friday morning said a people-centred development approach was the only way to ensure global security and prevent mass-scale atrocities such as “9/11” in the future.

The Department of Public Information’s (DPI) Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations decided this month to accept the applications of 31 NGOs to be associated with the Department, bringing to 1,549 the total number of officially affiliated groups.