General Assembly

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.

A frank and open exchange of views during the Disarmament Commission’s three-week session had helped to rebuild trust between delegations and set the stage to bridge longstanding differences of position and bring much-needed legitimacy to the United Nations disarmament machinery, speakers said today, as the body’s 2013 session drew to a close.

The Bureau of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People issued the following statement today, 16 April:

The past weeks have been a busy and exciting time featuring a number of historic events, General Assembly President Vuk Jeremić (Serbia) said today as he reviewed recent meetings and forecast the schedule for the coming months.

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, in collaboration with and at the invitation of the Government of Venezuela, will convene a special meeting at the historic Yellow House in Caracas on 17-18 April 2013. In parallel, the Government of Venezuela will be inaugurating a Palestinian cultural week.

The United Nations and its General Assembly, as a uniquely representative body on the world stage, had a key role to play in the rapidly evolving system of global economic governance, said delegates and high-level speakers today as they gathered for the Assembly’s second thematic debate in as many weeks.

The General Assembly today confirmed the Secretary-General’s appointment of Helen Clark to a second term as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and also adopted eight consensus texts recommended by its Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary), addressing, among other issues, human resources management, progress in setting up an accountability system and the cost to recover from damage to Headquarters caused by storm Sandy last October.

The international criminal justice system — hailed by some as one of the greatest legal achievements of the past century — could never replace national mechanisms in building true bridges between former enemies, stressed delegates today as the General Assembly concluded its unprecedented thematic debate on the link between global justice systems and reconciliation.

States could not expect to attain the goals of peace, development and respect for human rights without supporting a robust international criminal justice system, which gave a much-needed voice to the victims of the world’s most serious crimes and held to account the elusive perpetrators, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today during the General Assembly’s first-ever high-level thematic debate on the role of global judicial bodies in fostering rapprochement.

Amid growing tensions, it was a “critical time” for Member States to put pressure on Israel to comply with international law in order to “open the door” to a meaningful political process that would lead to a two-State solution, Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations, told the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People this morning.