Briefing by Spokesperson for Secretary-General

Briefing by Stephane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the Secretary-General.

• Categories: Media / Press Conferences
• Video Length: 00:09:48
• Production Date: 24 May 2019
• Asset Language: English
• Personal Subject: STEPHANE DUJARRIC
• Subject Topical: CONFERENCES; DISARMAMENT; INTERNATIONAL DAYS; PEACEKEEPERS; TRAVEL; TRIBUTES
• Geographic Subject: AFGHANISTAN; AUSTRIA; BANGLADESH; CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC; LIBYA; NORWAY
• MAMS Id: 2399565
• Parent Id: 2399565

Description

On the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, the Secretary-General today took part in a number of related events.

On Monday, the Secretary-General will arrive in Austria for a long-scheduled visit to attend a number of meetings around the 40th anniversary of the UN presence in Vienna.

Yesterday evening, we issued a statement on the Secretary-General’s behalf in which he condemned the attacks against villages in western part of the Central African Republic which left at least 34 civilians dead. The Secretary-General called on the authorities in the country to investigate these attacks and swiftly bring those responsible to justice.

“Securing Our Common Future” is the theme of the Secretary-General’s disarmament agenda, and today marked its first anniversary. In a video message recorded for the occasion, the Secretary-General cautions that “states need to seek security through diplomacy and dialogue, not by building new weapons.”

Our humanitarian colleagues in Libya are deeply concerned by the deaths of two more first responders in the line of duty yesterday, when two clearly-marked armored ambulance vehicles were struck by shelling in Tripoli.

A conference in Oslo concluded today, with some 50 States, UN agencies, NGOs and others having submitted written political, policy and best practice commitments on how to end sexual and gender-based violence, while many others outlined specific measures and showed their political will to end that scourge.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says that, due to sporadic rainfall in the country’s Teknaf peninsula, UNHCR and its partners will truck water to the 140,000 Rohingya refugees in the coming days.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) today sounded the alarm on the nutritional situation of children in Afghanistan.
Of the two million children under the age of five who are acutely malnourished, 600,000 of them are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and need to be treated to survive.