Plenary

The international community must “take a collective stand” to create a new global growth model based on stable economies, social equality, decent job opportunities and greater financial regulation to tackle the ongoing global economic crisis, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and senior economic officials said today at Headquarters.

The United Nations General Assembly today narrowly avoided an “intense, politically complex” procedural floor battle after the Swiss Ambassador withdrew a contentious draft resolution, sponsored by “small” countries, containing a set of recommendations for making the Security Council more transparent and accountable.

Senior United Nations officials and Government leaders today urgently called for strong global action to tackle transnational organized crime and drug trafficking in Central America, which they said had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the region already and now was spreading to Europe and Africa.

The General Assembly today, meeting concurrently with the Security Council, elected Dalveer Bhandari of India to a seat on the International Court of Justice for a term beginning immediately through 5 February 2018.

Recognizing the global public health and development burden resulting from road traffic crashes, the General Assembly today adopted a consensus resolution welcoming the national and local launches of the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 in over 100 countries, the regional launches, and other global events designed to stem the “staggering” number of preventable casualties on the roads.

Specialization made a major contribution to economic success, but precluded holistic thinking, a mindset vital to sustainable development, senior United Nations officials said today, underscoring the important role of science in crafting a new paradigm that reflected the impacts of human activity on the Earth’s system and sought to devise ways to minimize or reverse them.

The General Assembly today filled three impending vacancies on the United Nations Dispute Tribunal, the panel inaugurated in 2009 to help bolster the world body’s system for dealing with internal grievances and disciplinary cases.

Faced with socio-economic fallout from increasingly frequent and severe disasters, Governments must invest in disaster risk reduction and weave it into their development agendas in order to save more lives and build a sustainable world, a top aide to the United Nations Secretary-General told a gathering on disaster risk reduction today.

With more than a billion hungry people around the world now facing increasingly unstable food prices, collective will was needed to end excessive market speculation in food and other commodities, experts emphasized today as the General Assembly took stock of the “human tragedy” disproportionately affecting the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.

Acting on the recommendations of its Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary), the General Assembly this afternoon adopted a resolution advocating for a culture of accountability throughout the United Nations system, while affirming the need for the Assembly’s prior approval for any changes to the Secretariat’s overall departmental structure and programme budget.