Press Conference

In the past decade, Africa had posted impressive gains in peace and security, agricultural development and technological advancement, but heavy debt loads, labour market woes and gender inequality still plagued much of the continent, the top United Nations policy official on Africa said today during a Headquarters news conference.

Violations of human rights and international humanitarian law had escalated dramatically in the last months, Paulo Pinheiro, chair of an independent commission of inquiry on Syria, told reporters at Headquarters today.

Governments worldwide had made significant progress in overturning discriminatory laws and reforming legal codes to better protect and promote women’s rights, but their track record in putting those rules into practice remained unsatisfactory, a women’s rights expert said during a Headquarters news conference this afternoon.

Officials launching a United Nations report on very young marriages around the world this morning said it represented a “clarion call” to end a practice that every day cut short the childhoods of 37,000 girls, some as young as 5 years old, ending their education, endangering their health and entering them into a life of drudgery.

As the situation in Mali’s rebel-controlled north worsened, with reports of systematic executions, amputations and rape, most political leaders and civil society actors agreed that liberating the country must come before holding elections, Ivan Šimonović, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, told reporters at Headquarters today.

Recent data now contradicted several long-held beliefs about wartime sexual violence, including the assumption that rape was widely used as a strategic weapon of war, experts said today as they introduced the 2012 Human Security Report at a Headquarters press conference.

Hailing the strides made in gender justice by the Special Court set up to try atrocities committed during Sierra Leone’s civil war, a top United Nations official today called for the lessons learned during its proceedings to be documented and widely utilized in the continuing fight against impunity.

Elaborating a harmonized post-2015 sustainable development agenda and developing a consultative mechanism between the General Assembly and global economic institutions would top that body’s priorities during its sixty-seventh annual session, said its President during a Headquarters press conference today.

New York City Mayor and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg announced at Headquarters today a new investment in an innovative maternal health programme in the United Republic of Tanzania, saying it would impact at least 50,000 women and their children over the next three years.

Following is a transcript of UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson’s press conference held in New York, 2 October: