Meetings Coverage

The 2013 United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights was awarded today to five individuals and one judicial body at the General Assembly’s commemorative meeting to mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Four of its five outgoing members — Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Morocco and Pakistan — briefed the Security Council this afternoon on the work of the subsidiary bodies they had chaired during their two-year tenure, highlighting significant gains made and the challenges ahead.

The security situation in Libya remained “precarious”, amid violent protests over the presence of armed groups and mounting discontent with a protracted political process, the senior United Nations official in the country told the Security Council today, underlining the importance of national dialogue in producing a shared vision for the future.

Addressing the situation in Guinea-Bissau today, the Security Council strongly deplored the repeated military interferences in civilian affairs and called for respect of the constitutional order, including the electoral process.

It was urgent for the world to come together to sustainably safeguard the health of its oceans, which covered two thirds of the Earth’s surface, connected 90 per cent of the population, provided 350 million jobs, and had 1 billion people in developing countries dependent on the fish those waters yielded, delegates in the General Assembly heard today prior to adopting two related draft resolutions.

The General Assembly would urge that multilateral development banks continue to move forward on flexible, concessional, and fast-disbursing aid that would substantially and quickly assist developing countries, by terms of one of 16 draft resolutions the Second Committee (Economic and Financial) approved today by consensus.

The General Assembly today elected Jordan as a non-permanent member of the Security Council and appointed Morocco as a member of the Economic and Social Council’s Committee for Programme and Coordination.

Over the course of two decades, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had generated an extensive corpus of law and helped to end impunity, the Security Council heard today as it reviewed the court’s work, as well as that of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the judicial body mandated to complete their tasks.

The Security Council today authorized both the deployment of the African-led International Support Mission in the Central African Republic, known as MISCA, and the French troops already stationed in the strife-torn nation to support, by all necessary measures, the Mission in discharging its mandate.

The General Assembly, acting on the recommendations of its First Committee (Disarmament and International Security), adopted 53 texts today, reflecting both the common and divergent positions that had emerged during the session on such critical issues as nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, mainstreaming humanitarian concerns in that process, implementing the Arms Trade Treaty, and broadening the scope of the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms.