Meetings Coverage

CASTRIES, Saint Lucia, 13 May — The 2022 Pacific Regional Seminar on Decolonization concluded today, with delegations reaching agreement on a set of recommendations and conclusions.

The United Nations Committee on Information — concluding its forty-fourth session today under the shadow of the tragic killing of yet another journalist in the line of duty — approved two resolutions detailing Member States’ priorities for the Department of Global Communications, from fighting misinformation to helping States protect the fundamental rights to expression and opinion.

The Forum on Forests concluded its seventeenth session today, approving its omnibus resolution and a draft decision that its eighteenth session will be held at United Nations Headquarters from 8 to 12 May 2023, sending both texts to the Economic and Social Council for formal adoption.

The United Nations is not aware of any biological weapons programmes in Ukraine, a senior disarmament affairs official told the Security Council today, as it met to consider new information submitted by the Russian Federation alleging the existence of such weapons.

CASTRIES, Saint Lucia, 12 May — The long-standing question of decolonizing Western Sahara, the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) and Gibraltar took centre stage today, as the Pacific Regional Seminar on Decolonization entered its second day.

Delegates in the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today threw their support behind the Organization’s peacekeeping activities as Secretariat officials unveiled the details of a $6.5 billion budget earmarked for 11 missions in the upcoming 2022/23 fiscal year and the need to adequately fund peacebuilding activities through the Peacebuilding Fund.

With the devastating toll of war on Ukraine’s children becoming clearer each day, humanitarian efforts — punctuated by several “monumental” recent evacuations of trapped civilians — must continue to scale up, officials told the Security Council today, as the representatives of Kyiv and Moscow traded accusations of attacks on schools and educational indoctrination.

The Security Council, acting unanimously today, extended for six months the mandate of its interim security force in Abyei, a contested region on the border of Sudan and South Sudan, as well as its tasks related to border monitoring.

CASTRIES, Saint Lucia, 11 May — The 2022 Pacific Regional Seminar on Decolonization opened here today with “historic” representation for 11 of the 17 Non-Self-Governing Territories that remain on the United Nations list.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has intensified the pace of its launches using ballistic missile technology, having fired more missiles in the past five months than in the prior two years combined, a senior Secretariat official told the Security Council today.