General Assembly

The central role of the Palestinian political prisoners in the enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominated discussion in today’s United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine, as expert panellists shifted the discourse to the legal aspects of the arrests and detentions.

Nearly three years after its start in May 2008, the complex, multi-year overhaul of the historic United Nations Headquarters — known as the Capital Master Plan — was on track for completion between 2012 and 2014 with cost overruns of the $1.87 billion project now reduced to $80 million, Secretariat officials told the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) at its first resumed session today.

To deliver on the singular promise of sustainable development and the gains made over the past 20 years in defining its three-pillared approach — linking economic development, social development, and environmental protection — the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development must shift the discussion from function to form, especially within the United Nations system, the Preparatory Committee for that meeting heard today as it concluded its second session.

The United Nations Meeting on the Question of Palestine this afternoon turned its attention to the bleak situation and conditions of confinement for Palestinians in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, as it continued its examination of the urgent need to address the political prisoners’ plight.

VIENNA, 7 March — United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in a message delivered this morning by the Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Maxwell Gaylard, said that urgently addressing the plight of Palestinian political prisoners was “very important” to reaching a just and lasting peace, and that he had publicly urged the release of prisoners — numbered in the tens of thousands — last year during a visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel.

The Fifth Committee today approved the work plan for a three-week resumed session that will let delegates consider a Capital Master Plan now running more than $80 million over budget, the work of the Joint Inspection Unit, special political missions and other issues with financial implications for the 2010-2011 budget cycle.

The General Assembly decided this afternoon on new rules for the election of the 36 members of the Executive Board of the World Food Programme (WFP).

With the fate of the world’s nearly 7 billion people hanging in the balance, the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development would offer an historic opportunity to define the contours of a “green economy” and consider whether the existing institutional framework could adequately address all the cross-cutting issues affecting human well-being, speakers said today as they kicked off the second session of the Preparatory Committee for the Conference.

Under-Secretary-General Sha Zukang called today for collective action to address rising social tensions, ecological pressures and economic crisis, as representatives from around the world gather to prepare for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, scheduled to take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2012, with a preparatory meeting in New York on 7-8 March.

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People will convene the United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine. The Meeting will be held at the United Nations Office at Vienna on 7 and 8 March.