General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

Following protests across the Occupied Palestinian Territory in recent weeks, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had announced his intention to establish a unity Government and to conduct elections within six months, said a representative of Palestine at United Nations Headquarters today.

With its legislative, institutional and procedural mechanisms for protecting human rights meeting the highest European standards, Slovakia had made significant progress in implementing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Human Rights Committee heard today.

Warning that the past century’s heedless resource consumption had left the world at an uncertain crossroads, senior United Nations officials and Government leaders today challenged the international community to define and urgently implement a practical, twenty-first century development model that could “connect the dots between the key issues of our time” — climate change, population growth, poverty and environmental stress — and build a resilient, sustainable future.

Commending the Government of Togo for having abolished the death penalty and adopted a press code, experts of the Human Rights Committee expressed concern today at the number of draft laws awaiting passage in the National Assembly, especially a draft Criminal Code, and urged their adoption as soon as possible to prevent the perception that a lack of political will was interfering with much needed reform.

The General Assembly this afternoon, reopening consideration of its agenda item relating to the world social situation and to youth, ageing and disabled persons and the family, decided to hold a two-day high-level meeting on youth at Headquarters in New York on 25 and 26 July based on the overarching theme of dialogue and mutual understanding.

Togo was on an irreversible path to sustainable human development and democracy, which would enhance the protection of human rights and consolidate the rule of law in the wake of the period of national unrest that had followed the death of its President in 2005, the country’s Minister for Human Rights, Consolidation of Democracy and the Rule of Law told the Human Rights Committee today as it began its 101st session.

The Fifth Committee today took up proposed budgets for two United Nation’s special political missions — namely its Office in Burundi and its representative to the International Advisory and Monitoring Board — in the amounts of $23.1 million and $24,600 net, respectively.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon urged the international community today to hammer out a concrete plan during the Fourth United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries to improve the plight of the world’s most vulnerable people and meet the 2015 deadline for realizing the Millennium Development Goals.

The notion that delivering security would ultimately yield a Palestinian State actually excluded Palestinians from the political process, the International Meeting on the Question of Palestine heard today as it concluded its work with an examination of the link between the political prisoners and the broader Israeli-Palestinian political process, and adoption of an outcome document.

The central role of the Palestinian political prisoners in the enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominated discussion in today’s United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine, as expert panellists shifted the discourse to the legal aspects of the arrests and detentions.