United Nations Daily Highlights 96-08-30

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From: The United Nations Home Page at <http://www.un.org> - email: unnews@un.org

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Friday, August 30, 1996

HEADLINES

• The Security Council extends mandate of the UN Observer Mission in Liberia until 31 November 1996.
• The Security Council proposes the convening of a Regional Conference of the Great Lakes Region.
• The Security Council says that operational demining should be an integral part of a peace-keeping operation.
• India decries the circulation of a draft nuclear test-ban treaty as an official document of the Conference on Disarmament.
• Full-scale seismic experiments should continue at least through 1996, a Group of Scientific Experts said.
• The Preparatory Committee on the establishment of an International Criminal Court approves sections of draft report.

In a unanimous resolution, the Council welcomed the agreement of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Abuja on 17 August 1996, which extended the 1995 Abuja agreement until 15 June 1997.

The agreement also established a timetable for implementation, adopted a mechanism to verify compliance by the faction leaders with the agreement and proposed possible measures against the factions in the event of noncompliance.

Stressing the importance of close contacts and enhanced coordination between UNOMIL and ECOWAS Monitoring Observer Group (ECOMOG) in their operational activities at all levels, the Council called on ECOMOG to provide security for UNOMIL.

It urged all States to provide financial, logistical and other assistance in support of ECOMOG to assist it to carry out its mandate.

In a statement to the Council, the representative of Liberia, Ambassador William Bull, expressed gratitude to the international community for its efforts, adding that the Liberian people who had been deprived of their rights for so long were depending on the Council to take the lead in supporting the ECOWAS effort to achieve peaceful change in Liberia.

"As the Security situation continues to improve in the country, the Liberian delegation appeals that governmental and non-governmental organisations resume their activities in Liberia which are so vital to the humanitarian needs of the people and the revival of development activities in the country", Ambassador Bull said.

The Council declared its readiness to assist the people of Burundi with appropriate international cooperation to support a comprehensive political settlement. It acknowledged the implication of the situation in Burundi for the region and underlined the importance of convening, at an appropriate time, a Regional Conference of the Great Lakes Region. The proposed Regional Conference would be held under the auspices of the UN and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

In a Presidential statement read out by its President Ambassador Tono Eitel of Germany, the Council expressed its view against the background of the widespread indiscriminate use of anti-personnel mines in areas of UN peace- keeping operations. He said the mines posed serious impediments to such operations and to the safety of United Nations and other international personnel, he said.

"The early deployment of mine-clearance units will often be important to the effectiveness of a peace-keeping operation. The Council encourages the special Committee on peace-keeping operations to examine options for achieving such early deployment," the Council President said.

He said the Council emphasized the importance of coordination by the UN of activities related to mine clearance in the context of UN peacekeeping. Stressing that the primary responsibility for demining in the context of UN peacekeeping lay with the parties responsible for the laying of mines, the Council said parties to a conflict must desist from further mine-laying once a peace-keeping operation was established.

At a press conference on Friday, the Permanent Representative Ambassador Prakash Shah told UN correspondents that the CTBT should also end all nuclear weapons development either explosive based or non- explosive based. He added that it should not provide a license like the Non-Proliferation Treaty to proliferate nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile India has decried the circulation of a draft comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty as an official document of the Conference on Disarmament, saying it flouted an agreement among disarmament negotiators. The request to distribute the text as an official document came as the Conference wound up its plenary meeting of 27 August.

The representative of India at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Ms. Arundhati Ghose, on Thursday told delegates that the conference had accepted the verdict of its Ad hoc Committee on a Nuclear Test Ban that no consensus had been reached on the text, or even on transmitting it to the whole Conference.

Circulating, as an official document, a text which the Ad hoc Committee had agreed not to bring before the Conference called into question the decision- making process of the disarmament forum, she said.

Earlier, Australia announced its intention to submit the proposed treaty to the General Assembly in the form of a draft.

She said the Assistant Secretary-General told the Council that there had not been much progress in the exhumation of grave sites, noting the it had become clear that the parties and in particular the Republika Srpska and Bosnian Croat authorities were intent on limiting their cooperation and seeing the matter of exhumation as one of body exchanges. At the present time therefore, exhumations by one party on territory controlled by another are in abeyance due to the non-cooperation of the parties.

The expert work conducted by the Group over the last 20 years had proved useful in several ways to the test-ban treaty negotiations and would be useful in the possible implementation of the treaty, the Group Chairman said.

He added that progress in the technical work could be expected only when there was the political will to achieve results. "The group had served an important purpose ... by keeping a dialogue on test-ban verification going and thus contributing to keeping the comprehensive test-ban treaty on the international agenda," Mr. Dahlman said.

The Committee approved sections dealing with the organisation and method of work; establishment of the court and its relationship with the UN; the composition and administration of the court; procedural questions, fair trial and rights of the accused, penalties; and new proposals pertaining to topics discussed during the first session of the Committee.

The Preparatory Committee Chairman Adriaan Bos of the Netherlands said that it was difficult to draft recommendations on organisational matters in consultations in which all States were participating. Those participating had made an effort to take into account the views of all delegations, he said.

From the United Nations home page at <http://www.un.org> - email: unnews@un.org

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