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Briefing by the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General
The Secretaries-General of the United Nations and the League of Arab States express their deep concern over the situation in Gaza. They urgently appeal to donors to honour and disburse as soon as possible their financial commitments made at the October 2014 Cairo Conference.
Today is the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation. In his message, the Secretary-General calls on health workers around the world to eliminate the deeply harmful practice that affects at least 130 million girls and women in 29 countries.
From South Sudan, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Valerie Amos, and actor Forest Whitaker, who is, as you know, a Special Envoy for the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), arrived in Juba this morning on a three-day visit to assess the humanitarian situation in South Sudan and the need for timely funding for the aid operation there.
The Security Council was briefed, by Farid Zarif, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Kosovo. That was done by videolink from Kosovo in an open meeting. He said that today’s meeting took place at a key juncture of Kosovo’s history.
From Ukraine, our colleagues at the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said today that fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region is forcing more people from their homes, pushing the number of people who have been registered as internally displaced close to 1 million.
A couple of human rights notes from our colleagues at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. They expressed their concern about at least 300 people who remain in detention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after mass arrests during the recent protests in Kinshasa and in Lubumbashi.
On Ebola, a quick note from UNICEF. They said today that some 16,600 children are registered as having lost one or both parents or their primary caregivers to Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
In a statement issued today by the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), Ertharin Cousin, she paid tribute to Japanese journalist Kenji Goto for the support he had been providing to the World Food Programme in the last years of his life.
The Secretary-General’s meeting with Ivica Dačić, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia and Chair-in-Office of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe where they discussed the imminent resumption of the Belgrade-Pristina talks, which the Secretary-General welcomed.
The Secretary-General is announcing today the appointment of David Gressly of the United States as his Deputy Special Representative for Operations and the Rule of Law in the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known by its French acronym as MONUSCO.
