General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

“I am here to sound the alarm,” United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today, urging political leaders gathered for the General Assembly’s annual debate to overcome divisions and wilful blindness before it was too late to effectively address such global challenges as widespread insecurity, deepening inequality, government waste, and the impacts of climate change.

World leaders and civil society representatives reaffirmed today their commitment to the rule of law as the foundation of equitable State relations and the basis upon which just and fair societies were built, as they adopted a lengthy declaration during the General Assembly’s first-ever high-level meeting on the rule of law at the national and international levels.

The Second Committee (Economic and Financial) met this morning to fill the remaining vacant position on its Bureau for the sixty-seventh session of the General Assembly.

The General Assembly, convening the second meeting of its sixty-seventh session and acting on the recommendations of its General Committee, adopted a programme of work which contained nearly 170 items.

Faced with extraordinary challenges including terrorism, widespread geopolitical instability and the urgent need for sustainable development, the General Assembly — through a host of new initiatives and an unflagging commitment to the United Nations founding principles — must contribute more to the destiny of the planet, said that body’s new President, Vuk Jeremić, as he opened its sixty-seventh annual session this afternoon.

Faced with conflicts in the Arab world and other global challenges, the General Assembly had “stood strong, active and responsive” over the past year, making key advances in dispute settlement, United Nations reform, disaster prevention and sustainable development, Nassir Abdulaziz al-Nasser ( Qatar), its outgoing President, said today, as the sixty-sixth session drew to a close.

The United Nations, as the global human rights standard-bearer, must step up efforts to realize the rights of persons with disabilities, both at the national level and in its own work, speakers stressed today, as the fifth Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities drew to a close.

With the world’s people exhausted from war and angered by short-sighted Government policies that padded military budgets and gutted social programmes, senior United Nations officials and eminent peace advocates today opened the High-level Forum on a Culture of Peace stressing that education, youth outreach and women’s empowerment were the keys to wiping out poverty, injustice and exclusion.

Investing in children with disabilities during the early stage of their development was among the many practical measures that Member States should take, United Nations officials and delegates said today, as the fifth Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities continued.

The General Assembly today reaffirmed its central role on the “question of equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council and related matters”, amid growing demands to crystallize areas of convergence on an issue that has laid bare the difficulties of revitalizing the United Nations’ twentieth-century peace and security architecture.