Meetings Coverage

Decrying the “appalling” circumstances believed to affect roughly 10 million detainees worldwide, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture today described massive differences in the treatment of prisoners, and called, alongside other experts, for stiffer measures to improve prison conditions and ensure full respect for basic human rights standards, as the Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice continued in Salvador, Brazil.

Despite their systematic marginalization over centuries, women formed the very foundation of the world’s economy and development, the Commission on Population and Development was told today as it debated how population and development issues contributed in turn to gender equality and women’s empowerment.

The General Assembly, meeting today to act on a number of outstanding resolutions and make appointments to two of its subsidiary bodies, also paid solemn tribute to Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who was killed along with his wife and 94 others in a high-level military and civilian delegation, when the presidential plane crashed on landing outside the western Russian city of Smolensk.

The United Nations should develop a template to better educate everyone from schoolchildren to judges worldwide about criminal justice concepts, standards and the rule of law in order to create a safer, more just world, delegates said as the Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice continued in Salvador, Brazil, today.

While the international community had recently intensified efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the top United Nations political official today warned the Security Council that the situation on the ground “remains fragile and a crisis of confidence between the parties has so far prevented the resumption of talks”. “We cannot afford to lose this opportunity to reach an agreement,” said B. Lynn Pascoe, Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, as he briefed the Council.

While mortality had declined and life expectancy had risen across the world -- trends underpinned by a shift in the “disease burden” from communicable to non-communicable diseases -- the HIV pandemic had halted progress and, in some regions, reversed it, health experts told the Commission on Population and Development today, as it continued its general debate.

While advances in information technology held many benefits for society, its dark underside ‑‑ computer-based fraud and forgery, illegal interception of private communications, interference with data and misuse of electronic devices ‑‑ required States to develop an organized, international response, delegates said today at the Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.

The sustainability of the peace process in the Democratic Republic of the Congo would depend on the success of the efforts to stimulate recovery and reconstruction and to ensure the effective presence and authority of the State, as well as consolidation of democratic structures, the Head of the United Nations Mission in that country told the Security Council today.

People around the world were dying because their needs went unmet by health systems that were fragmented, broken and struggling, the Commission on Population and Development heard today as it continued its general debate on national experiences related to health, morbidity, mortality and development.

The Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice opened this morning in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, with a fervent call by United Nations and Government officials for stronger global cooperation among all stakeholders, as well as stronger legal tools to stamp out organized crime.