Plenary

Participants in this afternoon’s round table discussion on non-communicable diseases stressed the urgency of international cooperation to boost national capabilities in prevention, policy formulation, monitoring and analysis, as well as building health-care systems.

The United Nations will convene a High-Level Meeting on Tuesday, 20 September, to focus on actions aimed at protecting drylands, home to 2 billion people, as productive lands in dry regions around the world are increasingly threatened due to poor land-management practices and climate change.

Proclaiming the spread of non-communicable diseases a socio-economic and development challenge of “epidemic proportions,” Governments today pledged to work with the United Nations to adopt before the end of 2012 targets to combat heart disease, cancers, diabetes and lung disease and to devise voluntary policies that cut smoking and slashed the high salt, sugar and fat content in foods that caused them.

The United Nations General Assembly this morning adopted the agenda for its sixty-sixth session during a meeting which required two recorded votes to allow representatives of Libya’s National Transitional Council to stand for the strife-torn North African country in the world body’s work for the coming year.

“We come together at a critical juncture,” said the incoming General Assembly President Nassir Abdulaziz al-Nasser, as he opened the 193‑member body’s sixty-sixth session with a call to action on the United Nations to rethink the way it did business in the wake of ongoing global economic turmoil, popular protests that were upending once-stable Governments and the seemingly unending raft of natural hazards and man-made disasters.

While commending Member States for making headway on the major themes on the agenda of the General Assembly’s sixty-fifth session dealing with poverty reduction, global governance, a green economy and sustainable development, Joseph Deiss, the world body’s outgoing President today warned “our commitment in the name of the values of the United Nations has sometimes been too weak or too late”.

Amid a commemoration ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of the attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001, the President of the General Assembly today called on Member States to work for the swift conclusion of a draft general convention on terrorism during the world body’s upcoming sixty-sixth session.

Stressing that the voluntary moratoriums of nuclear-weapon States were no substitute for a legal prohibition, Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro today urged Governments that had not yet done so to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and bolster other efforts to create a world free of nuclear testing and nuclear weapons.

The General Assembly is set to convene, on 22 September, a one-day High-Level Meeting at United Nations Headquarters to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. “The High-Level Meeting in September is an important opportunity for Member States to renew their common political will towards eradicating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” said Joseph Deiss, President of the Assembly’s sixty-fifth session.

As the General Assembly concluded its debate today on challenges to achieving the human right to water and sanitation in the context of the Millennium Development Goals, delegates shed light on their nations’ struggles to resolve the practical implications of that quest.