Indigenous peoples have time and again shown themselves to be constructive partners with Member States and enrich the work of the United Nations, the Chair of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues stressed today, as she opened the body’s 2021 session.
As COVID-19 continues to expose links between gender inequality, food insecurity and poor access to health care and reproductive rights, the global community has an obligation to build back better, fairer and more sustainably for the estimated 10 billion people who will inhabit the planet by 2050, the Economic and Social Council’s Commission on Population and Development heard today, as members opened their fifty-fourth session.
The General Assembly adopted five resolutions and five decisions today, all without a vote, including four texts referred to it by its Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary), as its President, the Secretary-General and representatives of regional groups paid tribute to John Pombe Joseph Magufuli, President of the United Republic of Tanzania, who passed away on 17 March at the age of 61.
Ministers and other high-level officials concluded the 2021 Forum on Financing for Development Follow-up today, reaffirming their commitment to strengthen multilateral cooperation and solidarity to combat COVID-19’s frustration of global implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, tenuous even before the unprecedented crisis exacerbated existing ones.
The Economic and Social Council opened its annual financing for development forum today amid warnings that, with more than 3 million lives lost to COVID-19 and infections still on the rise, Governments must urgently heed the lessons learned thus far if they are to avoid a lengthy global recession.
The Commission on the Status of Women concluded its sixty-fifth session today, approving a wide-ranging set of agreed conclusions that broadly reaffirm the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action — adopted at the landmark fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 — as “crucial” to fulfilling the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as the world slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) concluded the first part of its resumed seventy-fifth session today, sending — without a vote — three draft resolutions and one draft decision to the General Assembly for adoption, but failing to reach agreement on the longstanding issue of human resources management.
Delegates urged a reckoning today with how the past injustices of the transatlantic slave trade perpetuate present racial discrimination and inequality around the world, as the General Assembly held a meeting to commemorate the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Noting with concern the situation regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID‑19) pandemic, the General Assembly adopted a decision today outlining protocols for delivering statements and presenting reports during plenary meetings in the remainder of its seventy-fifth session.
Already rampant around the globe, gender inequality has only worsened amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with women hard hit by job losses, school closures, rising poverty and spiking rates of domestic violence, speakers told the opening session of the Commission on the Status of Women today, describing equal representation as the “game-changer we need” in addressing the world’s toughest challenges.
