General Assembly

Deeply concerned that AIDS already had claimed 30 million lives and orphaned 16 million children since it was first discovered in 1981, the United Nations General Assembly today promised to partner with all stakeholders to implement “bold and decisive action” to wipe out what remained of an unprecedented global human tragedy despite significant progress in the past decade to combat the disease.

Paul De Lay, Deputy Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) hailed the world body’s expected adoption later today of a comprehensive strategy charting the global response to the deadly virus, including a commitment to halving sexual transmission of HIV by 2015, and a broader pledge to work towards increasing funding to tackle HIV/AIDS to between $22 billion and $24 billion per year by that time.

Women and girls bore a disproportionate burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and if Governments were serious about halting the disease in the next decade, they must throw their political weight squarely behind that issue by urgently expanding sexual and reproductive health services, legislating gender equality, and understanding that no gains would be made without ending violence against women, said participants today in a General Assembly panel discussion on “Women, girls and HIV”.

Innovative drugs, diagnostics, vaccines and microbicides to treat HIV infection must be developed urgently and made readily available worldwide, particularly to sex workers, homosexual men, intravenous drug users and others who needed them most, participants said this morning during a panel discussion held in connection with this week’s United Nations high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS.

Calling for a “prevention revolution” on the second day of the General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS, ministers and other high-ranking Government officials stressed that programmes to combat the disease must be mainstreamed into national health systems during the next phase of the global response to the pandemic, while emphasizing that those directly affected must be included in the search for solutions.

The tragic 30-year arc of the AIDS virus, which had left in its wake some 30 million people dead, nearly as many struggling to live with the disease and vast numbers of orphans, had likewise left the international community scrambling to answer a host of complex questions, such as how to accelerate targeted prevention interventions, and perhaps most critically, what can be done stop new infections.

Ten years after the world community had come together to forge the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS, participants in the first of five panels scheduled during this week’s three-day United Nations high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS called for a new paradigm in AIDS response that focused not only on the disease, but championed broader social development, supported the establishment of robust national health systems and, most importantly, responded to those without a voice.

After three decades, the global fight against AIDS was at a moment of truth and Governments, civil society and the private sector must come together to ensure that past commitments to achieve universal access to life-saving treatments were met and that the elusive pandemic was stopped in its tracks in the coming decade, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared today as he opened the General Assembly High-level Meeting on AIDS, which aimed to shape the future global response.

World leaders attending this week’s General Assembly High-level Meeting on HIV/AIDS must make bold commitments to reach the shared goal of zero new infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths, as the lives of all those living with or affected by the disease weighed in the balance, Assembly President Joseph Deiss (Switzerland) said at a Headquarters press conference today.

SAINT VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES, 2 June — The Caribbean regional seminar on decolonization had been a “lively” forum for sharing a range of views on the situations in the 16 Non-Self Governing Territories around the world, and the Special Committee on Decolonization must now undertake a self-analysis to better imagine its role in carrying out its work in the Third International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism (2011-2020), the Chair of the Special Committee said today.