General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

Access to justice must be ensured if a society were to be truly based on the rule of law, Sixth (Legal) Committee delegations emphasized today as they continued their deliberations on the principle and shared national practices.

The difficult and complex conventional arms control challenge, which delegates hoped would be mitigated with the coming entry into force of the Arms Trade Treaty, dominated debate in the First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) today.

Petitioners made impassioned appeals for settling the Western Sahara question for a third and final day today, as the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) considered Morocco’s role and record in the territory.

The international community could not afford to work in silos when combating the problems of illicit drugs and other transnational crimes, the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) heard today during its general discussion of crime prevention, criminal justice, and international drug control.

Finding a balance between the international and national dimensions of the rule of law was indispensable to furthering the principle’s just implementation, speakers told the Sixth (Legal) Committee as it opened deliberations on the topic.

To win the battle to eliminate nuclear weapons, the international community first needed to fight long and hard at the conceptual level and win the “battle of ideas”, the Disarmament Committee heard today as it continued its general debate.

While the Organization’s financial indicators for 2014 were generally sound, the United Nations senior management official told the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today that the regular budget’s cash position was low and under extra pressure from the emergency financing needs of the Capital Master Plan and emergency funding for the United Nations operations to control the Ebola outbreak.

In a detailed discussion examining progress in implementing the goals set forth at the landmark 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, delegates today traded views on the place of sexual and reproductive health rights.

The Second Committee (Economic and Financial) was the only Main Committee of the General Assembly to date that had adopted a decision on improvements to working methods, Committee Chair Sebastiano Cardi (Italy) told delegates today.

In a meeting dominated by harsh words and displays of raw emotion, the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) heard petitioners on Western Sahara emphasize the urgency of international action to settle the territory’s long-running quest for self-determination and also bolster regional and global security.