Plenary

Faced with conflicts in the Arab world and other global challenges, the General Assembly had “stood strong, active and responsive” over the past year, making key advances in dispute settlement, United Nations reform, disaster prevention and sustainable development, Nassir Abdulaziz al-Nasser ( Qatar), its outgoing President, said today, as the sixty-sixth session drew to a close.

With the world’s people exhausted from war and angered by short-sighted Government policies that padded military budgets and gutted social programmes, senior United Nations officials and eminent peace advocates today opened the High-level Forum on a Culture of Peace stressing that education, youth outreach and women’s empowerment were the keys to wiping out poverty, injustice and exclusion.

The General Assembly today welcomed Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s highly-anticipated report on strengthening the role of mediation in peaceful dispute settlement, adopting a consensus resolution encouraging Member States to make use of the newly-published United Nations guidelines on effective mediation.

The General Assembly today reaffirmed its central role on the “question of equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council and related matters”, amid growing demands to crystallize areas of convergence on an issue that has laid bare the difficulties of revitalizing the United Nations’ twentieth-century peace and security architecture.

In a wide-ranging meeting of the General Assembly today aimed at completing the agenda of the current session before ushering in the new one next week, attention focused on rolling back malaria, furthering the human security concept, and a dialogue on the link between macroeconomic policy and sustainable development.

Despite a fragile moratorium on nuclear-weapons testing, the risks posed by such activities still loomed heavily over the international community, expert panellists said today as delegates and other participants gathered in observance of the international day devoted to bringing an end to testing. “Nuclear tests are a threat to human health and global stability,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Assembly in a video message.

Presenting his fourth report on the responsibility to protect, which addressed the third pillar concept of “timely and decisive response”, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today that he was haunted by a fear that the international community did not live up to the vow of “Never again.”

With some 2.5 million people in Syria urgently needing assistance, the humanitarian situation was deteriorating, both in that strife-torn nation and in neighbouring countries affected by the nearly 19-month-old crisis, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today, as he briefed the General Assembly on the latest political, security and human rights conditions characterizing the crisis.

Gravely concerned by the escalating violence in Syria, the General Assembly today strongly condemned Damascus’ indiscriminate use of heavy weapons in civilian areas and its widespread violations of human rights, demanding that all parties “immediately and visibly” commit to ending a conflict that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called “a test of everything this Organization stands for”.

The responsibility now rested on the world to demonstrate its deep commitment to translating sustainable development into concrete results, according to the much-anticipated “Rio+20” draft resolution adopted unanimously by the General Assembly today.