Sixty-eighth General Assembly

Fifth Committee

44^th Meeting (AM)

Fifth Committee Unable to Take Action on Funding

 

for United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon

 

The Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today heard the introduction of a draft resolution on the financing of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) for the 2014/15 fiscal year, but failed to take action on the text.

The draft (document A/C.5/67/L.39) would set forth the amount to appropriate to the Special Account for UNIFIIL from 1 July 2014 to 30 June 2015 to maintain the Force and the United Nations Logistics Base at Brindisi, Italy, during that period.

Paul Ballantyne (New Zealand) said that delegates had not been able to reach consensus on the terms of the text during the Committee’s informal consultations.

Dayana Angela Rios Requena (Bolivia), introducing the text and speaking on behalf of the “Group of 77” developing countries and China, stressed that Israel should pay the amount due from the 18 April 1996 incident at the southern Lebanese village of Qana and asked the Secretary-General to report on that matter to the General Assembly at its sixty-ninth session.  In that regard, the Group had sponsored preambular paragraph 4 and operative paragraphs 4, 5 and 16 — which, among other things, expressed concern over Israel’s lack of compliance with earlier resolutions — and the text as a whole.

She noted that in response to Assembly resolution 67/279, the Secretary-General had reported in document A/68/757 that Israel had not paid the $1.12 million it owed UNIFIL for the Qana incident and that he had yet to receive a response from his subsequent letters on the matter, the latest of which was sent on 8 January 2014.

The Fifth Committee will meet again at a time and date to be announced in the Journal.

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For information media • not an official record