Security Council: Meetings Coverage

Amid extreme violence and a national political crisis now entering its fourth month, the raison d’être of the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan no longer applied, the head of peacekeeping operations told the Security Council today, saying it would suspend its current activities and re-focus on five priority areas.

A fragile retreat last week from the “brink of another crisis” in the Gaza Strip and Israel was a stark reminder that the status quo in the Middle East was not sustainable, the United Nations political affairs official told the Security Council today.

The people of Afghanistan people should not allow “spoilers and terrorists” to undermine their democratic future, to be determined in the April 2014 presidential election, the Security Council heard today as it voted to extend the mandate of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) until 17 March 2015.

After weeks of intense diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tensions in Ukraine, the Security Council today failed to adopt a draft resolution that would have urged Member States not to recognize the results of the referendum planned for 16 March in that country’s autonomous Crimea region, or any alteration of its status.

Fourteen years of a “static” approach to civilian protection in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had proven insufficient, and the United Nations mission there must transform into a robust, flexible and highly mobile entity, able to deploy across the country’s volatile eastern region, the world body’s senior official there told the Security Council today.

The Security Council today renewed the mandate of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) until 13 March 2015.

While an end to the crisis in Ukraine had proven elusive thus far, a peaceful solution remained possible, the Secretary-General’s senior United Nations political affairs official told the Security Council today.

Despite its mixed progress in decades of war, State collapse and immense human suffering, Somalia could reach its goals of elaborating an agreed Constitution, installing a nationwide electoral process and ensuring greater security by 2016, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council today.

Political divisions continued to undermine the management of Libya’s transition period, and the nation faced “the risk of embarking on a new trajectory of unprecedented violence”, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council today.

“My childhood was robbed by the Revolutionary United Front for two years,” former child soldier Alhaji Babas Sawaneh — abducted and conscripted in Sierra Leone at the age of 10 years — told the Security Council today just before it unanimously adopted a resolution strongly condemning all violations of international law applicable to the recruitment and use of children by parties to armed conflict.