General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

The General Assembly held a by-election today to replace a vacant seat in the Human Rights Council, the United Nations body responsible for promoting and protecting all human rights around the globe.

The support account for peacekeeping missions should correspond with the number and mandates of such operations in the field, speakers told the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budget) today as it considered the Secretary-General’s proposed budget for the account during the upcoming 2022/23 fiscal cycle as well as financing for five peacekeeping missions in Africa.

The delivery of essential United Nations mandates will suffer unless they act to ease the vicious cycle of liquidity shortages in the regular budget, the United Nations top financial official warned delegates in the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today as she discussed the Organization’s semi-annual financial situation.

Denouncing the epidemic of misinformation and disinformation proliferating during the coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis and the rising geopolitical tensions, delegates welcomed today an initiative by the Department of Global Communications to draft a code of conduct to promote integrity in public information while urging it to mainstream multilingualism into its activities.

Delegates of the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) urged each other today to disrupt the five-year deadlock over the crucial issues that cut across all operations — including sexual exploitation and abuse, the safety of peacekeepers and environmental safeguards. At the opening day of a resumed session dedicated to its global peacekeeping operations, Member States also emphasized the need to adequately finance the 11 peacekeeping missions, which now have a proposed budget of $6.5 billion, and resolve the Organization’s ongoing liquidity crisis.

With core United Nations values under the greatest strain since the Organization’s founding, the Department of Global Communications is spearheading robust efforts to stem the tide of disinformation, counter attacks on human rights and tell the human stories on the front lines of conflict, the agency’s top official told the Committee on Information, as members opened their forty-fourth session today.

Amid growing criticism of inaction by the Security Council on the war in Ukraine, the General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution today aimed at holding the five permanent Council members accountable for their use of veto.

After three weeks of discussion, the Disarmament Commission concluded its 2022 substantive session today — the first since 2018 — with the approval by consensus of its draft report to the General Assembly as well as the reports of its subsidiary bodies.

Amidst concerns about transparency and working methods, the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) approved, without a vote, a draft resolution forwarding the latest report of the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations for adoption by the General Assembly.

The General Assembly today adopted four texts, including a resolution approved by the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) that provides about $2.23 million in funding, known as revised estimates, for actions taken by the Human Rights Council during its thirty-third special session last year.