General Assembly

Condemning Friday’s bombing in Oslo and the shooting massacre at a Norwegian summer camp, delegates and youth advocates said today that this week’s General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on Youth would aim to end such extremist behaviour and guide young people on a path of tolerance and understanding. “We are here to prevent what happened in Norway in the future,” Jean-Francis Zinsou (Benin), a co-facilitator of the Meeting, said at a Headquarters press conference.

Singapore’s delegation to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women asserted today that gender equality was central to the country’s burgeoning socio-economic growth and responded to the Committee’s concerns over trafficking in persons, reservations to the women’s Convention, reinforced stereotypes and other issues, as it presented its latest periodic report.

Ratification by Djibouti of the international women’s Convention in 1999 had sparked a transformation in Djibouti that had “changed the landscape of the country”, the head of the delegation and Minister of the Promotion of Women and Family Planning of Djibouti said today, as the State party appeared before the monitoring Committee for its first-ever periodic review of implementation.

The delegation of Nepal today assured experts of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women that gender violence, discrimination and protection of minorities were being considered in the constitutional process under way and that strong measures were being taken to combat human trafficking and harmful social practices, as that country’s combined fourth and fifth periodic report came under review.

The progress of a general law against gender discrimination, the adequacy of programmes meant to address the low participation of women in elected positions and the vulnerability of divorced migrant women were discussed today by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, as it took up the Republic of Korea’s seventh periodic report.

Emphasizing the paramount importance of equality among the six official United Nations languages, the General Assembly today adopted a wide-ranging draft resolution on multilingualism. By that text, one of five adopted without a vote, the Assembly took note of the Secretary-General’s October 2010 report on multilingualism, and emphasized the need to use all the official languages appropriately in the activities of the Department of Public Information.

Defending Ethiopia’s track record in combating harmful traditional practices, improving “degrading” humanitarian conditions in refugee camps and enforcing a law that restricted the provision of humanitarian services to local charities, officials presenting their country’s combined sixth and seventh periodic reports to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women said today that the Government was doing its best to live up to its domestic and international obligations.

Strongly criticized today for harbouring negative stereotypes of women and discriminatory attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, Italian officials countered by describing their country’s recent enactment of robust and progressive programmes on both fronts, as the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women took up Italy’s sixth periodic report.

The Republic of South Sudan was admitted as the 193rd Member of the United Nations this morning by a General Assembly resolution adopted by acclamation upon the recommendation of the Security Council. “When we started our journey, we could hardly imagine that the road would lead us to this point, however much we may have hoped for it,” Riek Machar Teny, Vice-President of South Sudan, said as he delivered his country’s first statement to the Assembly.

Despite heavy financial constraints, a largely illiterate population and long-standing customary practices that subordinated women to men, Zambia had achieved a number of legislative milestones this year — the anti-gender-based violence act and the education act among them — and the Government was determined to continue improving women’s standing in a diverse society, officials told the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women today.