Meetings Coverage

Opening the General Assembly’s sixty-fourth session today, incoming President Ali Abdussalam Treki of Libya underscored that the United Nations and, in particular, the Assembly, “is the way to a better future”, and called on people of all colours, religions and origin to engage in dialogue through the Organization and its most representative body.

The success of Sierra Leone’s road towards stable democracy would depend largely on the extent to which its Government would be able to provide a “peace and democracy dividend” for all Sierra Leoneans, which would depend in turn on its ability to rally international support for its “Agenda for Change”, the head of the United Nations presence in that country told the Security Council today.

Some 1,300 non-governmental organization representatives from more than 50 countries concluded the sixty-second annual DPI/NGO Conference in Mexico City Friday evening with a fervent call to Governments and international organizations worldwide to strengthen their commitments to achieving a world free of nuclear weapons and to promptly start negotiating a convention prohibiting and eliminating those weapons everywhere within an agreed time-bound framework.

On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., speakers addressing the sixty-second annual DPI/NGO Conference in Mexico City on Friday morning said a people-centred development approach was the only way to ensure global security and prevent mass-scale atrocities such as “9/11” in the future.

With the world and its peoples facing unprecedented challenges, outgoing General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann today decried blatant inequality in the international system, and urged Member States to generate the political will to tackle poverty, provide safety nets for vulnerable countries and, even more importantly, to reinvent the United Nations and its major organs.

Stressing that human security could only be achieved through human development, civil society representatives called on Governments worldwide to cut defence budgets in favour of poverty reduction and sustainable development strategies, as the sixty-second annual DPI/NGO Conference in Mexico City continued Thursday afternoon.

Taking weapons out of the hands of those who used them would help save lives everywhere, but that alone would not stop the thriving global arms trade and make the planet safer, Alfredo Ferrariz Lubang, Regional Representative of the Bangkok-based Nonviolence International South East Asia, said as the sixty-second annual DPI/NGO Conference continued in Mexico City this morning.

To truly achieve complete global disarmament, the process of ridding the world of nuclear weapons must be verifiable, transparent and anchored in international law and the rule of law, Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, Vice-President of Programmes of the United States-based EastWest Institute, said as the sixty-second Annual DPI/NGO Conference continued in Mexico City on Wednesday afternoon.

Kicking off the sixty-secondannual gathering of non-governmental organizations this morning, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon made a passionate call to States parties to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to negotiate in good faith a convention to rid the world of its nuclear and conventional arsenal and to civil society to pressure leaders worldwide to stem the more than $1 trillion global weapons industry.

Through strong international support and the efforts of its Government, Haiti now had an historic chance to consolidate its political stability and escape from extreme poverty, United Nations Special Envoy William J. Clinton told the Security Council this afternoon.