General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

Defending Ethiopia’s track record in combating harmful traditional practices, improving “degrading” humanitarian conditions in refugee camps and enforcing a law that restricted the provision of humanitarian services to local charities, officials presenting their country’s combined sixth and seventh periodic reports to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women said today that the Government was doing its best to live up to its domestic and international obligations.

Strongly criticized today for harbouring negative stereotypes of women and discriminatory attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, Italian officials countered by describing their country’s recent enactment of robust and progressive programmes on both fronts, as the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women took up Italy’s sixth periodic report.

The Republic of South Sudan was admitted as the 193rd Member of the United Nations this morning by a General Assembly resolution adopted by acclamation upon the recommendation of the Security Council. “When we started our journey, we could hardly imagine that the road would lead us to this point, however much we may have hoped for it,” Riek Machar Teny, Vice-President of South Sudan, said as he delivered his country’s first statement to the Assembly.

Despite heavy financial constraints, a largely illiterate population and long-standing customary practices that subordinated women to men, Zambia had achieved a number of legislative milestones this year — the anti-gender-based violence act and the education act among them — and the Government was determined to continue improving women’s standing in a diverse society, officials told the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women today.

Costa Rica’s adoption of a gender-equality policy and the election of its first female President in 2010 were landmark events that would allow women more economic autonomy, political participation and social protection, all of which were essential to overcoming entrenched discriminatory barriers, the country’s delegation said today while presenting its combined fifth and sixth periodic reports to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

The United Nations and its partners sought to ensure that the history of the twenty-first century was the first “not to be written in the blood of innocents”, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as the General Assembly convened an interactive thematic debate on the role of regional and subregional arrangements in implementing the responsibility to protect.

With the changing political landscape in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond as a backdrop, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women had a vital role to play in redressing entrenched ills, including harmful traditional practices, sexual violence, persistent discrimination and a lack of access to education and employment, top United Nations human rights official Ivan Simonović said today as he opened the treaty body’s forty-ninth session.

The Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary), following days of what its Chairman called “very difficult and at times unorthodox” negotiations, closed its second resumed session this morning by approving the budgets for 13 United Nations peacekeeping operations, and agreed also on a one-time supplemental payment of $85 million over the next year to troop-contributing countries.

Emphasizing the fundamentally civilian character of aid, the General Assembly today reaffirmed the need for the consent of disaster-affected States when using military assets to support the implementation of humanitarian assistance, in conformity with international law, including international humanitarian law, and humanitarian principles.

In the early hours of the morning today, the General Assembly, acting on the recommendations of its Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary), adopted a peacekeeping budget of more than $7 billion for the period from 1 July 2011 to 30 June 2012.