Press Conference

While the activities of the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown were expected to end in October, the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor in The Hague, Netherlands, including appeals, was expected to run until February 2011, the Court’s Prosecutor, Stephen Rapp, said today at a Headquarters press conference.

States parties to the Rome Statute must strengthen cooperation with the International Criminal Court to arrest and bring to justice eight people charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity who remained on the run, the President of the assembly of signatory States said today.

Last week’s pledge by global leaders to mobilize $20 billion for sustainable agricultural development in three years was a major boon for food security worldwide, particularly as the World Food Programme (WFP) grappled with a major funding shortfall, the Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza and Coordinator of the High-level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis said today.

Emphasizing that the internal displacement crisis in Pakistan had reached a critical stage, United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes today implored the international community to bolster aid to the more than 2 million people who had fled the conflict between Government forces and insurgents in the country’s North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan.

One hundred and forty-four days before the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, countries still had some “formidable differences” to bridge in order to “seal a deal”, Janos Pasztor, Director of the Secretary-General’s Climate Change Support Team, said at Headquarters today.

The fight against terrorism, important as it was, must be conducted in conformity with the rule of law and the principles of due process, the Chairman of the Security Council’s Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee said at Headquarters today.

In response to the announcement that leaders of the Major Economies Forum had agreed to hold rising temperatures to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) today reaffirmed its call for short- and medium-term targets that would limit increases to below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The problems in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo had no single solution, but required a combination of efforts to deal with protection of civilians and integration into the national army of armed groups, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative said today at a Headquarters press conference.

General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann said the international community should be “very happy” about the outcome of the Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development, which had affirmed the 192-member body as the most suitable venue for discussion of serious economic matters.

With its porous borders and slack security making West Africa an easy target for criminal networks smuggling cocaine, guns, cigarettes and other illegal goods, the head of the United Nations anti-crime agency announced today a joint initiative that would integrate the expertise of regional actors with the global reach of INTERPOL (International Criminal Police Organization) to tackle the threats posed by organized crime in the subregion.