Meetings Coverage

Poverty eradication, climate change, the international financial system and development were among key topics approved for consideration by the Second Committee (Economic and Financial) this morning as it approved its organization of work for the sixty-fourth session of the General Assembly.

The Security Council decided this morning to extend the mandate of the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone (UNIPSIL) for one year, until 30 September 2010.

Noting with concern the threats to subregional stability, in particular posed by drug trafficking, organized crime and illicit arms, and reiterating the continuing need for support by the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) for the security of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Security Council today extended the Mission’s mandate until 30 September 2010.

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.