President Juan Manuel Santos will chair a UN Security Council meeting next month aimed at “giving a push” to reconstruction efforts in Haiti following last year’s earthquake, Spanish news agency EFE reports.
Speaking to reporters in Bogota, Santos said that “the UN is aware of its enormous responsibility to give more tools to those that want help who have, for some reason, so far not received them as the the process has not been effectively set up to help the country move forward.”
Santos also expressed his dismay that the situation in Haiti is still so dire after more than a year and called on the international community to “be more proactive.”
“We are extremely worried, it hurts us enormously what is happening there,” he stated.
The meeting will be held April 6 and will be attended by former U.S. President Bill Clinton along with the 15 other members of the Security Council.
Colombia was elected as a non-permanent member to the UN Security Council in October last year and will be representing Latin America and the Caribbean for the 2011-2012 period.
The earthquake that struck the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010 killed 316,000 people and is believed to have affected a further 3 million.