The United Nations was fully behind the electoral process in Guinea and confident that the elections set for 27 June would proceed smoothly, and it was equally engaged in the first round of elections in Niger, penned in the calendar towards the end of the year by the new leadership there in an effort to make the post-coup transition a short one, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Office for West Africa (UNOWA) said today.
In progress at UNHQ
Press Conference
Overdue commitments made to small island developing States must be fulfilled to enable them to survive climate change and other international crises that were threatening their very existence, officials from three such States said at a Headquarters press conference this afternoon.
Launching the third Global Biodiversity Outlook in New York today, a senior United Nations development official warned that, without swift action and renewed political will, current “alarming” biodiversity declines would continue, and some life-giving ocean and rainforest ecosystems would spiral towards collapse, threatening sustainable development and human well-being.
Convinced that recent Government-led climate negotiations had ignored the perspective of the people most affected by global warming, Bolivian President Evo Morales told reporters today that the United Nations should adopt the outcomes of a “people’s summit” he had convened last month in the Andean city of Cochabamba as a more inclusive, people-centred framework for future talks to ensure equitable decision-making and respect for the rights of the planet.
The United Nations has a decent chance to avert a catastrophe in drought-prone West Africa by taking timely action and scaling up its capacity to deal with the situation, but the effort would crucially depend on the needed resources being made available by the donor community, John Holmes, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator said today.
Young artists from the former Soviet States — Georgia among them — would commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Second World War with a concert at United Nations Headquarters showcasing the importance of tolerance and preservation of cultural ties, reporters were told today at a Headquarters press conference sponsored by the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation.
The comparatively quick and strong recovery of the Asia-Pacific region from the world economic crisis had provided an opportunity to foster a more equitable, greener, more interconnected and more stable economy in the region, a United Nations development official said today.
Enormous inequalities of consumption and a wasteful materials cycle were among the greatest challenges in achieving sustainable development, the Chairman of the Commission on Sustainable Development said this morning.
The President of the United Nations Security Council for May, Lebanon’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Nawaf Salam, today outlined a programme of work for the month, which will include debates, consultations and briefings on a broad spectrum of issues, and will also include at least one Council mission.
The key goal of the upcoming Review Conference of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was “to complete negotiations on defining individual responsibility for the crime of aggression”, William Pace, Convenor of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, said today at a Headquarters press conference ahead of the Review slated for 31 May to 11 June in Kampala, Uganda.