Meetings Coverage

While Mexico was working to build a participatory democracy that protected fundamental freedoms, the Government faced complex challenges in closing gaps in human rights legislation and reforming the laws, policies, and practices that gave rise to them, a senior official in Mexico’s Interior Ministry told the Human Rights Committee today as it began its ninety-sixth session.

As the international community grappled with the global financial crisis, officials in countries from Chile to Ireland were stepping up efforts to economically empower and improve the workplace status of their female citizens, delegates and a senior United Nations official said today as the fifty-fourth session of the Commission on the Status of Women continued.

Guinea-Bissau was experiencing a relatively stable political environment and growing international attention, which offered the country an unprecedented window of opportunity that should not be missed, the senior United Nations official in the country told the Security Council today.

Responding to the Secretary-General’s report on a proposed “accountability system”, speakers in the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today urged that more attention be given to what the United Nations leadership could do to foster a sense of personal responsibility among staff, in order to better address what some saw as weak links between resource allocation and desired results.

Implementing the Beijing Platform for Action was essential for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, but the well-known conceptual shift in approaching poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon had not been matched by a similarly comprehensiveapproach to women’s empowerment, the Commission on the Status of Women heard today, as it held two high-level panels that zeroed in on filling both strategy and implementation gaps.

The Security Council committee monitoring the implementation of sanctions on Iran was continuing to explore options for an effective response to a pattern of repeated violations, its Chairman told the Council this morning.

The international community must tackle head on the root socio-economic causes of violence against women, end impunity against perpetrators and recognize such abuse as a violation of women’s human rights, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences, said today during an address to the Commission on the Status of Women’s fifty-fourth session.

Calling women’s empowerment and gender equality fundamental to the United Nations identity, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon pressed for renewed determination in creating a future of equal rights, opportunity and progress for all as he opened a day of activities at Headquarters to commemorate International Women’s Day, which will be observed worldwide on 8 March.

Reaffirming the landmark Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, delegates attending the fifty-fourth session of the Commission on the Status of Women today pledged to undertake further action to ensure the full and accelerated implementation of those important instruments.

Assistant Secretary-General and United Nations Controller Jun Yamazaki today presented the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) with the Secretary‑General’s request for an additional $1 million for three special political missions -- the United Nations Representative on the International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq, the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning Al-Qaida and the Taliban, and the Monitoring Group on Somalia.