The United Nations on Thursday held a special ceremony to pay tribute to the 17 United Nations staff members killed by terrorists in Algiers, the Algerian capital, a year ago.
At the ceremony, the names of the 17 fallen were read out, followed by a moment of silence.
The December 11, 2007 attack claimed the lives of 17 UN staff members -- from Algeria, Denmark, the Philippines and Senegal -- working for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the Department of Safety and Security (DSS) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
The ceremony was co-organized by several UN agencies, including the UN Staff Council, UNDP, UNFPA and the UN International Civil Servants Federation.
Speakers at the ceremony included UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro, who delivered the Secretary-General's message.
Currently, Ban Ki-moon is in Poland to attend UN climate talks.
"One year after the attack, we still feel the searing pain and irreplaceable loss of the lives cut short on that day," Ban said in the message.
"Terrorists have taken these noble individuals from us," he said. "But they can never extinguish our hopes for global harmony nor our conviction that working together is the only path to a better world."
The UN staff members were killed when a car bomb destroyed the offices of UNDP and damaged those of UNHCR in Algiers.
On October 1, the Secretary-General called for collective responsibility and closer collaboration between the United Nations and member states to protect the UN staffs, who, along with humanitarian workers, are facing increasingly serious threats to their safety in many parts of the world.
"I'm gravely concerned by the wide scale of threats, the rise in deliberate targeting of humanitarian and UN personnel and their vulnerability worldwide," Ban said in his report, which covers the period from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008.
The period under review saw 490 attacks against UN offices, convoys and premises, with a 38 per cent increase in deaths of UN staff, or 26 deaths compared to 16 in the previous year. The majority of those casualties, 22 of the 26, were locally-recruited humanitarian and UN personnel.
"The security of humanitarian and United Nations personnel continues to deteriorate," Ban said, noting that over the course of the past year, they were "the targets of deliberate attacks by extremists, armed groups and disgruntled sections of populations in all areas of humanitarian and United Nations operations."
Most of the security incidents directed against UN staff occurred in Africa. However, Ban said, "while threats by extremists existed in the past in a few locations, the threats have expanded indiscriminately to all locations."