General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

Meeting after a three-year hiatus, the Disarmament Commission opened its 2022 substantive session today amid rising geopolitical tensions and concerns over deepening mistrust between some of the world’s largest military Powers.

The Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today wrapped up the first part of its resumed seventy-sixth session by sending the General Assembly three resolutions and one decision, yet still not giving the Secretary-General guidance on human resources or resolving the Organization’s ongoing liquidity problems.

There can be no atonement if there is no repair, the keynote speaker during the General Assembly’s annual event commemorating the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade said today, as many speakers joined the growing calls for reparations to the descendants of human beings bought and sold as chattel for generations.

Humanity continues to do more harm than good to nature, with the planet facing multiple existential threats requiring urgent corrective action, speakers and panellists today told the Preparatory Committee for “Stockholm+50:  a healthy planet for the prosperity of all — our responsibility, our opportunity”, the international environmental conference scheduled for 2 and 3 June 2022 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Continuing its emergency special session today, the General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing that the Russian Federation’s military offensive inside Ukraine — and its humanitarian consequences — are on a scale that the international community has not seen in Europe in many decades.

The General Assembly resumed its emergency special session today to discuss two competing draft resolutions on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine — one that implicates the Russian Federation’s military offensive in the unfolding humanitarian crisis and the other that makes no mention of Moscow’s aggression against its neighbour.

The Special Committee on Decolonization decided today to hold the 2022 Pacific Regional Seminar in Castries, Saint Lucia, from 11 to 13 May, with a view to evaluating the colonial status of the 17 Non-Self-Governing Territories that remain under its purview.

As the Intergovernmental Conference, tasked with drafting a legally binding instrument on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity, concluded its fourth session today, delegates decided to hold a fifth session with the goal of finalizing a new treaty and stressed the need to facilitate greater participation to allow all countries and communities to have a say in how marine resources existing outside of national jurisdiction should be shared.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated rising, pervasive and deeply rooted systemic racism around the world that must be dismantled and exorcised — including through reparations — speakers said today as the General Assembly commemorated the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, observed annually on 21 March, date of the 1960 massacre in Sharpeville, South Africa.