General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

The Fifth Committee today approved the work plan for a three-week resumed session that will let delegates consider a Capital Master Plan now running more than $80 million over budget, the work of the Joint Inspection Unit, special political missions and other issues with financial implications for the 2010-2011 budget cycle.

The General Assembly decided this afternoon on new rules for the election of the 36 members of the Executive Board of the World Food Programme (WFP).

With the fate of the world’s nearly 7 billion people hanging in the balance, the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development would offer an historic opportunity to define the contours of a “green economy” and consider whether the existing institutional framework could adequately address all the cross-cutting issues affecting human well-being, speakers said today as they kicked off the second session of the Preparatory Committee for the Conference.

In an unprecedented move today, the United Nations General Assembly suspended Libya’s membership in the Human Rights Council, the Organization’s pre-eminent human rights body, expressing its deep concern about the situation in that country in the wake of Muammar Al-Qadhafi’s violent crackdown on anti-Government protestors.

Addressing the first meeting of the 2011 substantive session of the Special Committee on Decolonization, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called today for “concrete results” in the quest for self-determination by the world’s 16 remaining Non-Self-Governing Territories.

The Peacebuilding Commission decided today that it would place Guinea on its agenda, acting for the first time without a referral from the Security Council but responding instead to a request from the West African country itself.

The United Nations must urgently address the challenges of modern peacekeeping, including a severe imbalance in the “division of labour” between troop and financial contributors, and resource shortfalls that left peacekeepers vulnerable to attacks, delegates said today as the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations concluded its general debate.

The United Nations would aim in the coming year to build on 2010 efforts to bolster the ability of the “blue helmets” to protect civilians, defuse conflict and foster sustainable peace in strife-torn areas through a range of policy-development, operational capacity, field support, planning and oversight-improvement measures, the head of the world body’s peacekeeping operations told the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations as it opened its 2011 substantive session today.

As the General Assembly convened its first-ever informal thematic debate on disaster risk reduction today, senior United Nations officials called urgently for investment in advanced planning and sound policies to help countries avert natural hazards that would cost more in human and financial terms than steps to prevent them or reduce their impact.

Expressing deep concern at the challenges to Member States and the United Nations humanitarian response capacity to deal with the consequences of natural disasters, General Assembly delegates today urged updating early warning systems, disaster preparedness and risk reduction measures at all levels to fulfil pledges made in the 2005 Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015, a global blueprint to reduce social, economic and environmental losses caused by such emergencies.