General Assembly

Despite laudable progress in lowering its overall vacancy rate to 11 per cent and streamlining and strengthening work processes, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) still had work to do to improve its capacity to analyse risks and investigate complex financial and procurement cases, speakers said today as the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) discussed programme monitoring and reviewed the efficiency of United Nations administrative and financial functioning.

The First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) today approved its agenda and work programme for the sixty-seventh General Assembly session at a brief organizational meeting.

As they considered the proposed scale for assessing Member States’ financial contributions to the Organization during the 2013-2015 period, delegates in the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today differed over whether the scale was suitable to achieve their common goal of keeping the United Nations financially sound in an era of economic belt-tightening around the globe.

In a brief organizational meeting today, the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) approved its work programme for the current session, containing more than a dozen topics for consideration, including the effects of atomic radiation, questions relating to the University of Peace, and the granting of independence to Non-Self-Governing Territories and peoples.

As they adopted their programme of work for the sixty-seventh session today, delegates of the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) aired their concerns about the financing of special political missions, budgetary discipline and the Secretariat’s perennial late submission of documents.

Elaborating a harmonized post-2015 sustainable development agenda and developing a consultative mechanism between the General Assembly and global economic institutions would top that body’s priorities during its sixty-seventh annual session, said its President during a Headquarters press conference today.

Commending Sierra Leone for committing to peaceful, free and credible elections, the Peacebuilding Commission today stressed the need for national leadership and sustained international support in managing the root causes of conflict, addressing emerging threats to peace consolidation and establishing conditions conducive to holding the presidential, parliamentary and local council polls, slated for 17 November.

A week of thoughtful and constructive interventions by the General Assembly’s Member States — nearly all of whom had touched on issues related to the theme of the sixty-seventh session, the peaceful settlement of disputes — had catalyzed a “fruitful discourse” on ways to stabilize the world’s increasing geostrategic volatility and unpredictability, said Assembly President Vuk Jeremić (Serbia) as he closed the body’s annual general debate.

Foreign Ministers of small nations today called on Member States to take responsibility for strengthening the international multilateral system through respect for the rule of law and with the United Nations at its centre, to overcome global security, human rights, economic, environmental and development crises, as the General Assembly held the fifth and penultimate day of its annual general debate.

With their countries locked in a life-and-death struggle against climate change — a battle they were currently losing — leaders of some of the world’s smallest and most vulnerable nations today warned the General Assembly that apathy about the health of the planet and “political cowardice” on reaching a post-Kyoto Protocol climate deal had left them one category 2 hurricane away from economic and social collapse.