Press Conference

In an effort to mobilize the potential of the African diaspora to help revitalize their ancestral homeland and spur the growth and empowerment of people of African descent worldwide, the African Union would organize a first-ever global summit on the topic in May, the President of the Pan-African Parliament said today at Headquarters.

With a food crisis looming over Africa’s Sahel belt and potentially threatening up to 12 million people, a senior United Nations humanitarian affairs official said today that, even as regional Governments moved swiftly to put resilience-building strategies in place, the wider international community must take “decisive and generous” action to ward off disaster.

After lodging protests against what he described as the United Kingdom’s militarization of the South Atlantic with the leadership of major United Nations bodies, Argentina’s Minister for Foreign Affairs called today for the start of dialogue on the sovereignty of the Malvinas Islands (Falklands).

Argentina’s allegations that the United Kingdom was deliberately increasing its military presence in the South Atlantic was “manifestly absurd”, Mark Lyall Grant, the latter country’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said at a Headquarters press conference today.

French fashion designer agnès b. and a panel of ocean experts welcomed today the arrival in New York of the Tara Oceans Expedition, which was poised to complete a three-year journey to gather critical information on how climate change would further damage the world’s major bodies of water.

Everyday people — from a Japanese oyster fisherman cultivating his business by planting trees in an estuary devastated by the 2011 tsunami, to two Michigan teenagers campaigning to ensure Girl Scout cookies and other palm oil-based products were deforestation-free — were among the panellists sharing their grass-roots approaches to forest preservation at a Headquarters press conference today.

Briefing correspondents at Headquarters on the situations in South Sudan and other African countries, Hervé Ladsous, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, said that tackling the myriad challenges on the continent required the United Nations to continue strengthening its partnership with the African Union and other regional actors.

The widely circulated Internet reports that he had graphically threatened the Prime Minister of Qatar prior to the recent Security Council vote on Syria were “blatant lies”, Vitaly Churkin, Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation, said at Headquarters today.

The newly appointed Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria announced a unique partnership today between her office and the United Nations Millennium Campaign, aimed at accelerating her country’s attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. Describing the partnership as a key element in her country’s “countdown” strategy, Precious Gbeneol said it would greatly help realize the Millennium Goals, not only in Nigeria but throughout Africa.

An advisory opinion on damages from climate change by the International Court of Justice, proposed by small island States and others, would complement and not conflict with efforts to create a negotiated international climate regime, the President of Palau said this afternoon. “While we continue to negotiate, we should renew our faith in a system of law that has guided States’ actions in the past and gives them legitimacy today,” President Johnson Toribiong told correspondents.