Emergency.lu

Under the con­tract signed on 28 April 2011 between the Min­istry of For­eign and Euro­pean Affairs and the pri­vate part­ners HITEC Lux­em­bourg, SES Tech­Com and Lux­em­bourg Air Ambu­lance, renewed in 2014 and 2020, the satel­lite telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form ​“emer​gency​.lu” has been oper­a­tional since 2012. The first deploy­ment took place in Jan­u­ary 2012 in South­ern Sudan.

Thus, on 22 March 2022, the tenth anniver­sary of emer​gency​.lu was cel­e­brat­ed at the Lux­em­bourg pavil­ion at Expo 2020 Dubai, in the pres­ence of H.R.H. the Grand Duke Hen­ri. At the same time, Lux­em­bourg wel­comed the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of ETC (Emer­gency Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Clus­ter) for their ple­nary assem­bly at the Lux­em­bourg pavil­ion. For the anniver­sary, again, a recep­tion was held in Lux­em­bourg on 15 Decem­ber 2022 in the pres­ence of Franz Fayot.

Dur­ing 2022, at the oper­a­tional lev­el, Luxembourg’s human­i­tar­i­an action con­tin­ued to pro­vide telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion ser­vices in sup­port of human­i­tar­i­an organ­i­sa­tions in the Cen­tral African Repub­lic, Nige­ria, Niger, Chad, Venezuela and Syr­ia, at the request of the World Food Pro­gramme (WFP), ETC, the Office of the Unit­ed Nations High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees (UNHCR) and UNICEF. Two emer​gency​.lu ter­mi­nals were installed in Ton­ga to recon­nect two islands fol­low­ing destruc­tion caused to sub­ma­rine cables dur­ing the erup­tion of the Ton­ga-Hun­ga vol­cano. Two oth­er anten­nas were posi­tioned in Dnipro and made avail­able to ETC in the con­text of Russia’s aggres­sion against Ukraine.

With­in the frame­work of emer​gency​.lu, Lux­em­bourg pro­vides its sup­port for the work of its part­ners in terms of capac­i­ty-build­ing, organ­is­ing var­i­ous train­ing cours­es in the Grand Duchy. In 2022, five train­ing cours­es were deliv­ered at the Cen­tre for Train­ing and Sem­i­nars of the Cham­ber of Employ­ees (CEFOS) in Remich, at the request of ETC and UNHCR.

In 2022, as part of its com­mit­ment to UNDAC, the UN sys­tem for dis­as­ter assess­ment and coor­di­na­tion, which is man­aged by the UN Office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­i­an Affairs (OCHA), the Grand Duchy deployed experts to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of Con­go and Madagascar.