General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

Through the strategic use of resources, digital technologies, social media platforms and enhanced partnerships with United Nations system offices and external media outlets, the Department of Public Information was expanding and improving the way it conveyed the United Nations message worldwide, the Organization’s senior communications official told the Committee on Information as it opened its annual session this morning.

While the Disarmament Commission had achieved the minimum necessary to consider its 2012 session a “relative success”, Chairman Enrique Román-Morey challenged delegates to also ask why — despite huge personal efforts and displays of flexibility — they had failed to achieve the consensus needed to allow them to prepare the ground for discussion of key disarmament matters elsewhere, in negotiating forums.

The Special Committee on Decolonization — also known as the Special Conference of 24 — today decided to hold its Pacific Regional Seminar in the Ecuadorian capital Quito, from 30 May to 1 June this year, to review progress in the United Nations decolonization process.

Recognizing the global public health and development burden resulting from road traffic crashes, the General Assembly today adopted a consensus resolution welcoming the national and local launches of the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 in over 100 countries, the regional launches, and other global events designed to stem the “staggering” number of preventable casualties on the roads.

Specialization made a major contribution to economic success, but precluded holistic thinking, a mindset vital to sustainable development, senior United Nations officials said today, underscoring the important role of science in crafting a new paradigm that reflected the impacts of human activity on the Earth’s system and sought to devise ways to minimize or reverse them.

The Disarmament Commission met briefly this morning and completed the Bureau for its 2012 session with the election of two Vice-Chairs and a Rapporteur.

The General Assembly today filled three impending vacancies on the United Nations Dispute Tribunal, the panel inaugurated in 2009 to help bolster the world body’s system for dealing with internal grievances and disciplinary cases.

Faced with socio-economic fallout from increasingly frequent and severe disasters, Governments must invest in disaster risk reduction and weave it into their development agendas in order to save more lives and build a sustainable world, a top aide to the United Nations Secretary-General told a gathering on disaster risk reduction today.

With more than a billion hungry people around the world now facing increasingly unstable food prices, collective will was needed to end excessive market speculation in food and other commodities, experts emphasized today as the General Assembly took stock of the “human tragedy” disproportionately affecting the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.

Acting on the recommendations of its Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary), the General Assembly this afternoon adopted a resolution advocating for a culture of accountability throughout the United Nations system, while affirming the need for the Assembly’s prior approval for any changes to the Secretariat’s overall departmental structure and programme budget.