Abidjan, 25 November 2009... The Special Representative of the UN Secretary- General for Côte d'Ivoire, Y.J. Choi, met with President Laurent Gbagbo on Wednesday in Abidjan to discuss the challenges facing the electoral process following the launch of the appeals phase of the provisional electoral list.

At the end of his meeting, Mr. Choi said: "We have a solid base with the provisional electoral list, which is both balanced and solid and we already have 83% of people cross checked, numbering 5.3 million. This is a good base because the number of people on the 2000 list was only 3.5 million," he explained, adding that this increase was reliable enough to obtain a solid definitive electoral list.

However, the chief of UNOCI recalled that there were still challenges to overcome. "The first is that there can still be delays for technical reasons. We should think of minimizing these because we have a window of opportunity that is very precious," he added.

On the issue of security, Mr. Choi said that the prospects were very good in this domain. "There is no problem, everyone moves around freely and the pre-campaign is going well, in security, throughout the country. So, we are confident that we will be able to provide security for the electoral process," he stressed.

Finally, with reference to his certification mandate, Mr. Choi recalled that it was about "safeguarding the process as well as the election result. So, we are going to cooperate with each other in order to achieve the presidential election, which is a crucial phase for the crisis-resolution process".