General Assembly

ADDIS ABABA, 30 April — As the United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine wrapped up its session today,experts urged African Governments to share their negotiating and institution-building tactics, create a continent-wide solidarity movement, and launch a regional peace initiative to help Palestinians remove barriers to statehood.

ADDIS ABABA, 29 April — Welcoming the recent visit by the United States President to the West Bank and Israel and the subsequent resumption of $500 million in United States aid to the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon this morning said that now was the time for concerted action to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Recognizing that the “indispensable” partnership between the United Nations and the African Union remained a solid foundation for the peaceful resolution of conflicts in Africa, Governments in the General Assembly today welcomed intensified cooperation between the two organizations in order to stamp out all outstanding disputes on the continent.

With the quest to unite the African continent and transform it into a region of economic prosperity and social justice never closer to fulfilment, senior United Nations officials today hailed the “rise of a new Africa”, but also called on the international community to engage much more resolutely to help bring to an end the conflicts that continued to tragically claim the lives of so many Africans.

The United Nations’ Department of Public Information must perform a balancing act in expanding multilingual coverage of issues within the existing financial and human resources and finding the right mix of traditional and new media to tackle emerging communication challenges, delegates told the Committee on Information today as it concluded its general debate.

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People will convene the United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine in Addis Ababa at the United Nations Conference Centre, on 29 and 30 April. The theme of the Meeting is “African solidarity with the Palestinian people for the achievement of its inalienable rights, including the sovereignty and independence of the State of Palestine”.

Through new media, multilingual information platforms, and stronger partnerships with Member States, the Department of Public Information was conveying the United Nations’ message to global audiences in a more cost-effective and coordinated way, its senior communications official told the Committee on Information as it opened its annual session this morning.

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People met in Caracas, Venezuela, on 17-18 April, and issued the following Declaration:

With an “irreversible torrent” of physical and ecological transformations threatening to profoundly alter human existence, senior United Nations officials joined Government delegations today urging rapid progress on the Organization’s objectives for sustainable development, as well as in the design of new approaches for protecting and healing the finite resources of our embattled planet.

The thirty-fifth annual session of the Committee on Information, the intergovernmental body charged with reviewing progress in the field of United Nations public information, will take place at Headquarters from 22 April to 2 May.