General Assembly

BANGKOK, 10 July — The settlement “enterprise”, said one of five panellists this afternoon as the United Nations Asian and Pacific Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace rounded out its first day, had the purpose of solidifying Israeli control over the Occupied Territory and ensuring that under any future diplomatic arrangement, Israel would retain possession of vast and strategically important tracts of Palestinian land.

BANGKOK, 10 July — United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today that the long-hoped-for two-State solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was “increasingly at risk, moving us further away from our shared objective of a comprehensive peace in the region”. In a message to the United Nations Asian and Pacific Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, the Secretary-General warned that the peace process had been for some time at a “dangerous standstill”.

The world was watching and the pressure mounting to hammer out in the coming days an effective instrument that would address licit and illicit conventional arms flows, delegates were told today as the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty continued its work at Headquarters.

Stressing that the struggle for women’s equality was far from won, Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson today called on the international community to unite in politically empowering women and erasing gender-based discrimination and oppression in all aspects of public and private life.

With women and girls among the major victims of the violence perpetrated with illegally traded conventional arms, it was vital that an arms trade treaty take into account and contain specific gender-based violence criterion, the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty Conference was told today as it entered its second week of negotiations in New York.

The rampant use of forged documents to open the floodgates for rising numbers of conventional weapon deliveries to fragile areas must be among the critical issues tackled by a robust international arms trade instrument, the representative of Dominican Republic told delegates at Headquarters, as the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty continued its month-long meeting today.

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People will convene the United Nations Asian and Pacific Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace on 10 and 11 July at the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), in Bangkok. The theme of the Meeting will be “International efforts at addressing the obstacles to the two-State solution — the role of Asian and Pacific governmental and non-governmental actors”.

An effective arms trade treaty was an “opportunity to sow the seeds of durable peace and spark hope among millions that violence and conflict can be overcome,” the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty heard today as it continued its month-long session in New York. “The world can no longer wait for much-needed regulation of the trade of conventional weapons,” declared the representative of Costa Rica in a statement to the Conference.

Concerned by the forced demographic changes resulting from the conflicts in Georgia, and the humanitarian situation causes by the 2008 armed conflict, the General Assembly this morning recognized the right of return of internally displaced persons to their homes throughout that country, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while adopting consensus texts on the Year of Crystallography and United Nations support for promoting democracy.

The absence of global conventional arms regulations was “a disgrace” in an over-armed world where peace was under-funded, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told delegates today after opening the highly anticipated month-long United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, stalled yesterday and throughout much of today, owing to wrangling over the meeting’s rules of procedure.