General Assembly

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.

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.