Jan Egeland
Jan Egeland
Jan Egelandis a Norwegian politician, formerly of the Labour party. He has been the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council since August 2013. He was previously the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch and the Director of Human Rights Watch Europe. Egeland formerly served as director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Under-Secretary-General of the UN. Egeland also holds a post as Professor II at the University of Stavanger...
NationalityNorwegian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 September 1957
CountryNorway
All in all we expect the U.N. involvement to grow as we expect there to be a very considerable increase in the number of international relief flights to the United States from many parts of the world.
The number one priority is to get to those who have nothing. If we don't, we will become a disaster within a disaster.
I have received assurances from the government that this will never be repeated and that the government has taken a number of actions to prevent such an event in future. This is good new for us, because we don't want to leave Cote d'Ivoire - we want to stay and continue our effective actions for all the Ivorian people.
Stopping these attacks against women, children, the displaced and refugees and ensuring their protection is our number one priority.
probably be many billions of dollars. However, we cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages that have just been wiped out.
Then we could have not only a tsunami-style casualty rate as we have seen late last year, but we could see one hundred times that in a worst case.
These are people who have a strong attachment to their ancestral homes,
This has never ever happened before, that two weeks after a disaster that we have $717 million that we can spend on the immediate emergency effort.
I think with all its local and regional flaws, it was the most effective, efficient and response-oriented relief effort ever. We had never faced a challenge like this in our history, with a dozen countries on two continents hit at the same time.
The insecurity in Sri Lanka has claimed over 100 lives in recent weeks with increasing civilian casualties.
I had, in my capacity as a state secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s, many contacts with the Somaliland authorities.
The backdrop is a dramatic one in Zimbabwe, one of the most dramatic in the world. Life expectancy has plummeted from around 63 years in the late 1980s and early 1990s to 33.9 years in 2004. This is a meltdown. This is a nearly halving of life expectancy.
I did say this was one of the world's neglected emergencies. The victims of the terror are still neglected to a high degree and the situation unabated. We need to do more.
Our assistance in Somalia has been remarkably effective and successful, and we have helped with very small resources - a large group of people and we can now do even more.