Economic and Social Council

In a resumed organizational session today, the Economic and Social Council filled vacancies in three of its subsidiary bodies, electing members by secret ballot and by acclamation. Voting by secret ballot, the Council elected Iran to a four-year term on the Commission on Population and Development, beginning today and expiring at the close of that body’s forty-eighth session in 2015.

While well versed in overseeing the implementation of peace accords, the United Nations system had much less experience in supporting indigenous peoples and communities in conflict resolution, and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues should consider what kind of role it could play in addressing those gaps, that body was told today as it took up the report of its Special Rapporteur on the status of implementation of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord of 1997.

As output growth remained feeble in the developed world, robustly growing emerging economies in Asia and Latin America would continue to drive global economic recovery for the rest of the year and during 2012, United Nations economists said this afternoon during a Headquarters news conference.

With nearly a billion people living without access to an improved water source and 2.5 billion lacking access to improved sanitation facilities, the world faced a “true crisis” the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation told the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues today, during a half-day discussion on the right to water.

Wrapping up what the United Nations Secretariat called one of its “most successful sessions” since the 1990s, the Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) adjourned its resumed 2011 session today, having taken note of its draft report, to be adopted at a later date.

At a Headquarters press conference today, human rights activists urged the United Nations to play a greater role in pushing for implementation of the 1997 Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord in Bangladesh, which was intended to protect the rights of the area’s indigenous peoples.

Bedouin Palestinian refugees living in the West Bank were in dire need of access to their traditional natural resources — rangeland and water — as well as basic health and education services, denied to them since their forcible displacement from the Negev Desert in 1948, community representative Mohamed Al Korshan said at a Headquarters press conference today.

A strategic approach was urgently needed to address “disturbing” gaps between the world’s richest and poorest children — in particular indigenous children — said delegates to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, as it met with United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) representatives this morning.

The Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations today voted to deny the granting of consultative status for the International Lesbian and Gay Association, thus closing its application after 10 years of repeated deferral.

Indigenous peoples must be consulted — and their right to free, prior and informed consent respected — if the target of halving the proportion of people lacking access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation was to be reached by 2015, in line with the Millennium Development Goals, members of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues said at a Headquarters press conference today.