General Assembly

Vowing to break the world’s paralysis in the face of mass atrocities typified by the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge killing fields and the Rwanda genocide, delegates in the General Assembly grappled today with how -– and whether -– to implement the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine, during a half-day informal interactive dialogue.

With the General Assembly holding its first ever thematic debate on the responsibility to protect populations from genocide or other war crimes, a diverse panel of academics struggled today during a press conference to find common ground on how the concept, seen by some developing nations as a Western ploy to meddle in their domestic affairs, could ever be fairly or effectively applied.

Denmark had established strong institutional mechanisms, including a Minister for Gender Equality and a complaints board, to protect women’s rights in the labour market and curb domestic violence and human trafficking for sexual exploitation, the Deputy Permanent Secretary of Denmark’s Department for Gender Equality told the Committee monitoring State parties’ compliance with the Women’s Convention today.

Spain had made sweeping moves to empower and legally protect women since Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero took office in 2004, including enactment of laws to erase gender inequality and gender-based violence, as well as action plans to help the country’s most socially and economically vulnerable women gain access to health care, education, employment and housing, Spain’s first ever Minister of Equality, Bibiana Aido Almagro, said this afternoon.

The United Nations Peacebuilding Commission has welcomed a report by the Secretary-General on peacebuilding in the immediate aftermath of conflict, delivered to the Security Council today. The report follows a request from the Security Council last year and is part of a series of related initiatives aimed at consolidating and strengthening the United Nations response in the area of peace and security.

The responsibility to protect was focused on non-indifference and making it everyone’s responsibility to ensure that no one would ever again have to look back with the mixture of emotions that had greeted the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur, asking, “How did we let this happen?”, Gareth Evans, Co-Chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, said at a Headquarters press conference today.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon this morning urged Member States to help save humanity from genocide and other massive human rights abuses as he opened a General Assembly special session on the subject of the responsibility to protect, which will continue with a thematic interactive dialogue and general debate on Thursday, 23 July.

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, fearing that in the midst of the global financial crisis the rights of elderly women would fall by the wayside, was encouraging States parties to the women’s Convention to mainstream older women’s concerns into national strategies and development programmes, Committee Chairperson and expert from Egypt, Naela Mohamed Gabr, said this afternoon during a Headquarters press conference.

This year, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women should seize the opportunity of the thirtieth anniversary of the women’s rights Convention and the tenth anniversary of its Optional Protocol to raise their visibility and strengthen their impact for the sake of women worldwide, with the ultimate aim of getting more States to ratify both instruments and withdraw any reservations to them, Naela Gabr, Committee Chair said this morning.

Security Council reform had come a long way since the beginning a new intergovernmental negotiation process in February, the facilitator on that issue in the General Assembly said at a Headquarters press conference today, announcing a third round of talks to begin on 27 August.