General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

BANGKOK, 10 July — United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today that the long-hoped-for two-State solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was “increasingly at risk, moving us further away from our shared objective of a comprehensive peace in the region”. In a message to the United Nations Asian and Pacific Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, the Secretary-General warned that the peace process had been for some time at a “dangerous standstill”.

The world was watching and the pressure mounting to hammer out in the coming days an effective instrument that would address licit and illicit conventional arms flows, delegates were told today as the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty continued its work at Headquarters.

Stressing that the struggle for women’s equality was far from won, Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson today called on the international community to unite in politically empowering women and erasing gender-based discrimination and oppression in all aspects of public and private life.

With women and girls among the major victims of the violence perpetrated with illegally traded conventional arms, it was vital that an arms trade treaty take into account and contain specific gender-based violence criterion, the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty Conference was told today as it entered its second week of negotiations in New York.

The rampant use of forged documents to open the floodgates for rising numbers of conventional weapon deliveries to fragile areas must be among the critical issues tackled by a robust international arms trade instrument, the representative of Dominican Republic told delegates at Headquarters, as the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty continued its month-long meeting today.

An effective arms trade treaty was an “opportunity to sow the seeds of durable peace and spark hope among millions that violence and conflict can be overcome,” the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty heard today as it continued its month-long session in New York. “The world can no longer wait for much-needed regulation of the trade of conventional weapons,” declared the representative of Costa Rica in a statement to the Conference.

Concerned by the forced demographic changes resulting from the conflicts in Georgia, and the humanitarian situation causes by the 2008 armed conflict, the General Assembly this morning recognized the right of return of internally displaced persons to their homes throughout that country, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while adopting consensus texts on the Year of Crystallography and United Nations support for promoting democracy.

The absence of global conventional arms regulations was “a disgrace” in an over-armed world where peace was under-funded, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told delegates today after opening the highly anticipated month-long United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, stalled yesterday and throughout much of today, owing to wrangling over the meeting’s rules of procedure.

Culminating its third biennial review of the 2006 United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, the General Assembly today unanimously adopted a resolution renewing its unwavering commitment to strengthening international cooperation to prevent and combat all forms of the scourge, and emphasizing the need to promote worldwide solidarity in support of the victims of terrorist acts.

Calling for coordinated action and results, the President of the General Assembly today urged Member States to accelerate implementation of the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, the wide-ranging framework adopted in 2006 to defeat what delegations referred to as a “hydra-headed scourge”.