Sixty-seventh General Assembly

Plenary

97^th Meeting (PM)

General Assembly Acts to Establish Open-ended Working Group Charged

With Enhancing 193-Member Organ’s Role, Authority, Efficiency

Members also Adopt Decision on Security Council Membership, Representation

The General Assembly today decided to establish, at its sixty-eighth session, an open-ended ad hoc working group tasked with identifying ways to further enhance the role, authority, effectiveness and efficiency of the 193-nation body.

Acting without a vote, the Assembly adopted a draft resolution contained in the report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Revitalization of the Work of the General Assembly (document A/67/936), by which it decided that the new Working Group would continue its review of the inventory of relevant Assembly resolutions.  Further by the text, the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to indicate the constraints and reasons behind any lack of implementation of those texts.

The Assembly reaffirmed that the relationship between the principal organs of the United Nations “is mutually reinforcing and complementary, in accordance with their respective functions and powers as enshrined in the Charter”, stressing the importance of ensuring increased cooperation, coordination and the exchange of information.  It also recognized the value of holding interactive inclusive thematic debates on current issues of critical importance to the international community, and invited the President of the General Assembly to continue that practice.

Speaking before the action, General Assembly President Vuk Jeremić ( Serbia) stressed the need to invest additional efforts in revitalizing the Assembly’s work with all deliberate speed.  In 1945, the Assembly had been established as the democratic repository of the rights of all nations — large and small, developed and developing — to live in peace, security and prosperity, he said.  For decades, however, the great promise made by the Organization’s founders had not been fulfilled in its entirety.  “A more effective, transparent and inclusive Assembly is an imperative for the twenty-first century,” he emphasized, noting that revitalization held the key to enabling the institution to tackle the complex challenges that could not be solved in isolation from one another.

Taking oral action on the question of equitable representation on the Security Council and an increase in its membership, the Assembly decided to reaffirm its own central role on that matter, and to convene an open-ended working group if Member States so decided.  It also decided to include the topic in the agenda of its sixth-eighth session.

The General Assembly will meet again at a date and time to be announced.

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For information media • not an official record