General Assembly

The world’s current economic growth model – characterized by extreme production and consumption, slashed forests, and polluted air and water supplies — was operating at nature’s expense and, while it was not too late to change course and improve our relationship with Mother Earth, “time is running short,” the General Assembly was told today.

Palestinians were ready, willing and would prefer to reach a peace treaty with Israel by September — the deadline set by United States President Barack Obama and endorsed by the European Union to end protracted negotiations — paving the way for Palestinian independence and United Nations membership, Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of Palestine, said today in the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

Taking note of the “grave financial situation” of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the General Assembly today requested Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to continue to support the Agency’s institutional strengthening through the provision of financial resources from the United Nations regular budget.

The United Nations Disarmament Commission elected Liseth Ancidey of Venezuela this morning as Chair of its Working Group 3. The election followed consultations within the Group of Latin American and Caribbean States.

In a world where threats could be as sudden and unpredictable as a tsunami or as protracted and unyielding as an oppressive dictatorship, an expanded paradigm of security was needed to encompass the broad range of conditions threatening people’s survival, livelihoods and dignity, United Nations Deputy-Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro said today, as she opened the General Assembly’s informal thematic debate on human security.

Updating the press on the latest developments regarding the work of the sixty-fifth General Assembly, Joseph Deiss, the 192-member body’s President, today highlighted a host of upcoming topical debates and took questions on the push for Palestinian statehood, as well as on the status of the negotiations to reform and expand the Security Council.

With calls for good governance, transparency, trustworthy legal systems and accountability for crimes ringing out from the Arab world to Africa, Asia and Europe, the rule of law represented the world’s “best hope for building peaceful, prosperous societies”, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the General Assembly today during an informal thematic debate convened as part of the preparatory process for the high-level meeting on the rule of law planned for 2012.

Thirty years into the AIDS epidemic, and 10 years after the landmark General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS, it was clear that the energy and activism of civil society had been crucial to progress against the epidemic, and Governments and civil society must forge stronger partnerships to adapt the global response to quickly changing realities on the ground, the General Assembly was told today, as it convened an informal interactive hearing with civil society.

The Secretary-General of the upcoming Fourth United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries characterized negotiations towards commitments for development assistance to those countries as making “encouraging but slow progress”, as the second session of the Intergovernmental Preparatory Committee closed this afternoon.

An annual International Day of Human Space Flight was declared by the General Assembly this afternoon, to be celebrated on 12 April, the date of the first manned space flight in 1961.