General Assembly

A frank and open exchange of views during the Disarmament Commission’s three-week session had helped to rebuild trust between delegations and set the stage to bridge longstanding differences of position and bring much-needed legitimacy to the United Nations disarmament machinery, speakers said today, as the body’s 2013 session drew to a close.

The thirty-fifth annual session of the Committee on Information, the intergovernmental body charged with reviewing progress in the field of United Nations public information, will take place at Headquarters from 22 April to 2 May.

The past weeks have been a busy and exciting time featuring a number of historic events, General Assembly President Vuk Jeremić (Serbia) said today as he reviewed recent meetings and forecast the schedule for the coming months.

The Bureau of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People issued the following statement today, 16 April:

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, in collaboration with and at the invitation of the Government of Venezuela, will convene a special meeting at the historic Yellow House in Caracas on 17-18 April 2013. In parallel, the Government of Venezuela will be inaugurating a Palestinian cultural week.

Amid growing tensions, it was a “critical time” for Member States to put pressure on Israel to comply with international law in order to “open the door” to a meaningful political process that would lead to a two-State solution, Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations, told the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People this morning.

The Disarmament Commission was a unique forum where delegates could “think and debate” and — after years of stalemate — there was now a need to build on positive momentum and find convergence on critical issues, speakers said today as they wrapped up the general debate of their substantive session and moved into focused working groups to tackle the most pressing items on their agenda.

In a “very complex” security environment — marked by diplomatic divisions between national and international interests, slow progress on nuclear disarmament, and the “relentless” expansion of military budgets — the Disarmament Commission’s record would be judged less by the volume of its words than the quality of its outcomes, said Angela Kane, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, as she opened the deliberative body’s 2013 substantive session.

The Special Committee on Decolonization — also known as the Special Committee of 24 — today decided to hold its Pacific Regional Seminar in Guayaquil, Ecuador, from 28 to 30 May 2013, to review progress in the United Nations decolonization process.

After two weeks of closed-door consultations, a sweeping arms trade treaty text setting out principles and rules to regulate the staggering array of weapons that changes hands each year failed to achieve consensus tonight, but several delegations, not willing to return to their countries “empty-handed”, promised to move the draft treaty to the General Assembly for adoption as early as next week.