General Assembly: No name

The following statement was issued today by the Spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres:

The fifth session of the Conference on the Establishment of a Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded today at United Nations Headquarters in New York with the adoption of a report.

Concluding its seventy-ninth session today, the Sixth Committee (Legal) approved, without a vote, 16 draft texts — one of which saw the Committee, in a historic process of informal discussions, able to maintain its tradition of consensus as it launched the process to negotiate an international convention to govern the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity.

The Second Committee (Economic and Financial) today approved three draft resolutions, two by recorded votes, on entrepreneurship, small island developing States and a new international economic order.

The Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural) concluded its session today by approving seven draft resolutions — including measures aimed at eliminating racism and addressing the world drug problem — bringing the total number of those texts forwarded to the General Assembly for adoption to 49.

Concluding its work for the current session, the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) approved five texts today, four of which were draft resolutions concerning Israel and Palestine, which took recorded votes.

With another two vetoes cast this week in the Security Council — one on a cessation of hostilities in Sudan and one on a Gaza ceasefire — the importance of the “veto initiative” is now “even more profound”, the General Assembly heard today.

The Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) approved five draft resolutions addressing the human rights situations in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Syria and the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, and forwarded them to the General Assembly for adoption.

The report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices is a distortion of reality and promotes a particular political agenda aimed at “destroying Israel’s image as a democratic State,” that country’s delegate told the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) today, while other speakers called for a permanent end to the Israeli settler activities, in keeping with the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.

Delegates at the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today heard Secretariat officials lay out the details behind their request for a $2.09 million appropriation to keep the Office of the Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General for the Sudan running smoothly in 2025.