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President Olusegun Obasanjo will this morning declare open the Seventh Ordinary Meeting of the Assembly of Health Ministers of.....
President Olusegun Obasanjo will this morning declare open the Seventh Ordinary Meeting of the Assembly of Health Ministers of the West African Health Organization (Waho )
The ministers who are meeting for two days at the Ecowas Secretariat in Asokoro, Abuja will brainstorm on a reproduction health commodity security strategy for West Africa.
Issues to be discussed at the meeting include the reports of health ministers' programmes committee and the committee of health experts, whose three-day meeting began on Monday, 24th July 2006 in Abuja.
The health experts' report will include updates on the avian flu and polio epidemics in the region, the reduction of taxes and tariffs on commodities for malaria control as well as private-public sector partnerships for local production of generic and anti-retroviral drugs in Ecowas member-states.
Their report is also expected to include recommendations on the creation of a West African Documentation and Health Information Network, policy harmonization for food fortification in the region as well as equivalencies of specialist medical diplomas and reciprocal recognition in member-states.
The Ministers will also consider the implications, for Waho, of the transformation of the Ecowas Secretariat into a commission from January 2006 and approve the 2007 budget for the health organization, among other issues.
Also expected to participate in the two-day meeting are representatives of the eight-member Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa (UEMOA), the African Union, the European Union, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the World Health Organization and UNICEF, among others.
Earlier on Monday, Ecowas embarked on a three-day seminar to discuss the 13 major UN legal instruments for international cooperation in countering terrorism in a bid to combat the act of terror which has caused serious problems in most of its member-states
The seminar will expectedly also afford members the opportunity to share experiences that would not only contribute to the acceleration of the ratification of the instruments by member-states but also their implementation.
Dr. Mohamed Ibn Chambas, Executive Secretary of the community, , said "Ecowas cannot afford to remain indifferent to efforts directed at improving assistance to the victims of terrorism and providing support to enable countries affected by terrorism to cope with associated losses since member-states are signatories to the Madrid Declaration and Plan of Action."
He explained further that the Madrid Declaration attested to the commitment of the international community to address the challenges posed by terrorism to human and socio-economic development.
He pointed out that security remained a major consideration in the regional architecture for peace and stability within ECOWAS which explains the high number of regional instruments devoted to the promotion of regional security such as the Protocol on the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeeping and Security as well as the Conventions on Extradition and Mutual Assistance on Criminal Matters.
Chambas also said that national laws on such unpredictable acts as terrorism would need constant review to reflect its dynamics in order to enable member-states to prevent or react effectively to acts of terrorism without necessarily curbing civil liberties.
Also the Project Coordinator of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the UNODC, Mr. Walter Gehr, said the variety of tools in the global fight against terrorism and organized crime "is useless as long as we don't familiarize ourselves with them in practice."
He added that the UNODC has developed a software package that ECOWAS member-states would find useful in the fight against terrorism, as it would help them to benefit from mutual legal assistance provisions in international instruments particularly in "creating effective requests, receiving more useful responses without delay and streamlining the process."
He said the seminar was part of the activities of the UNODC organized under the rubric of the Global Project against Terrorism and sponsored by 15 member states of the United Nations.
The country representative of the UNODC, Mr. Paul Salay, said that countries are increasingly realizing that concerted action was required to address the problem of terrorism and the concomitant threats to global peace and security.