Meetings Coverage

With facilitators appealing for more time to wrap up the work of the tenth session of the United Nations Forum on Forests, Chairperson Mario Ruales Carranza (Ecuador) urged delegations to redouble their efforts and show flexibility so that expected late-night negotiations would yield concrete, consensus-based decisions by tomorrow.

Despite success in cracking the silence around the systematic use of sexual violence as a war tactic, it persisted as one of the world’s most vicious crimes, destroying individual lives and terrorizing communities, delegates in the Security Council stressed today, calling on the 15-member body to ratchet up pressure on perpetrators and use its full means to prevent its occurrence.

While Côte d’Ivoire had entered a positive “new phase” in consolidating the hard-won peace achieved following the 2011 post-election crisis, the West African nation continued to face formidable security threats — including from disruptive networks affiliated with the former regime — which required the continued presence of the United Nations Operation in the country, the Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations told the Security Council today.

While welcoming a 75 per cent increase in donations to the voluntary trust funds supporting the work of the United Nations Forum on Forests, the Director of that entity’s Secretariat stressed today that contributions needed to be scaled up in the coming year so the Forum could carry out its expanded mandate and take steps to remedy its “precarious” staffing situation.

Capping debate in the Security Council today on ways to anticipate, prevent and respond more nimbly to conflict across the vast and varied African continent was a presidential statement that stressed the need to address the root causes and regional dimensions of the violence and underlined the valuable contribution of regional and subregional organizations in ensuring the coherence, synergy and collective effectiveness of those efforts.

The United Nations and its General Assembly, as a uniquely representative body on the world stage, had a key role to play in the rapidly evolving system of global economic governance, said delegates and high-level speakers today as they gathered for the Assembly’s second thematic debate in as many weeks.

Although agreement on a counter-terrorism convention still eluded delegates, their decision to meet again and continue discussions on outstanding issues offered hope for the future, said the Chair of the General Assembly’s Ad Hoc Committee on the issue today as he closed its week-long sixteenth session.

The General Assembly today confirmed the Secretary-General’s appointment of Helen Clark to a second term as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and also adopted eight consensus texts recommended by its Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary), addressing, among other issues, human resources management, progress in setting up an accountability system and the cost to recover from damage to Headquarters caused by storm Sandy last October.

Midway through its two-week session, the United Nations Forum on Forests this afternoon considered plans, including the introduction of draft resolutions by its two Working Groups, for the second week’s discussion.

The international criminal justice system — hailed by some as one of the greatest legal achievements of the past century — could never replace national mechanisms in building true bridges between former enemies, stressed delegates today as the General Assembly concluded its unprecedented thematic debate on the link between global justice systems and reconciliation.