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
This appeal, ... is truly forward-looking in that it attempts to avert hunger and at the same time promote sustainable recovery of livelihoods. Investing in prevention will prove much more cost effective than providing emergency assistance year after year.
I would salute the very effective American efforts to warn the populations of the imminent danger and the very successful evacuation.
There are many countries in the Gulf and elsewhere who have received an enormous windfall from these oil prices, ... their aid would be much more effective if offered through the United Nations.
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.
I don't know how you evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from the Himalayas -- the most effective military alliance in the world should be able to know that.
We're in a bad year. There have been more international disasters than usual. All the wars are continuing. The Pakistan situation will have an effect elsewhere.
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.
I think it would be a massive undertaking to actually have a full-fledged tsunami warning system that would really be effective in many of these places,
The big non-governmental organizations, the ones with which we work all over the world, understood the value of coordination. The same cannot be said about all the newer players on the ground.
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.
That had been one of our fears. I think it has not been the case.
They will now have their sixth, seventh night out in the cold. Perhaps even without a tent. They will also not have water because their spring is gone,
This is a very major earthquake but it's really aggravated a thousand times by the topography. An earthquake is bad anywhere, in the Himalayas it becomes much worse,
It's no good saving people today just to see them killed tomorrow. They need help to escape the vicious cycle they find themselves in.