Press Conference

A global network of child rights monitors today called on the Security Council to prioritize child concerns during its planned visit to Afghanistan, where it said more than 1,000 children had been killed in 2009 as a result of aerial bombings, night raids, landmines and other explosives.

The International Criminal Court, unfit for its purpose and marred by double standards, was destroying peace processes in sub-Saharan Africa, David Hoile, an African scholar and public affairs consultant, said today at a Headquarters news conference sponsored by the Permanent Mission of the Sudan to the United Nations.

With the scale and complexity of United Nations peacekeeping operations increasing dramatically over the past decade, new and innovative approaches to disarmament, demobilization and reintegration — driven more by practitioners in the field and their local partners than by diplomats in New York — were beginning to make a difference on the ground, a senior peacekeeping official said today.

At a Headquarters press conference today, the General Assembly President elect for the sixty-fifth session, Joseph Deiss ( Switzerland), said that the priorities of his tenure would be global and environmental governance, human rights, the environment and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

Specific means of tracing small conventional arms and eradicating the illicit cross-border trade in them will be the focus of a Headquarters meeting next week, its designated Chairperson told correspondents at Headquarters this afternoon. Pablo Macedo of Mexico told journalists that the Fourth Biennial Meeting of States on Small Arms and Light Weapons, to be held 14-18 June, will review implementation of the 2001 Programme of Action on the illicit trade of those armaments.

The world had become “marginally less peaceful”, in the last 12 months, Clyde McConaghy, a Board Member of the Institute for Economics and Peace, said today at a Headquarters press conference on the results of the Global Peace Index for 2010. Highlighting key findings of the Index, he said internal country indicators, such as the likelihood of violent demonstrations, homicide rates and perceptions of criminality within society, were major drivers that created a less peaceful world.

With more than 13,000 police officers serving in peacekeeping operations — from Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region to earthquake-ravaged Haiti — the world body aimed to boost the number of women officers to 20 per cent by 2014 while strengthening training programmes to better prepare recruits to handle complex post-conflict and post-disaster situations, United Nations Police Adviser Ann-Marie Orler said at Headquarters today.

A coalition of States working to end piracy and armed robbery off the Somali Coast held its sixth meeting today at United Nations Headquarters and briefed correspondents afterward on the operational challenges they were facing, among them the vast distances of ocean that needed protecting and the lack of legal capacity among most countries of the region.

The head of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS said today that, while the number of people in low- and middle-income countries that had gained access to antiretroviral therapy had increased by 10-fold in the past five years, a “prevention revolution” was needed to ensure more targeted prevention measures and provide broader access to treatment — especially for women and at-risk groups.

The diplomat overseeing negotiations on reforming the United Nations Security Council said today that since Member States finally had a text reflecting “all positions”, he was optimistic that talks on the issue would be more focused and the nettlesome process, ongoing for more than 15 years, could finally be concluded.