General Assembly

To create a true environment of religious tolerance and open dialogue, said the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief this afternoon, the method of communication and connection needed to be diverse and multi-faceted.

With a nascent national human rights mechanism and freshly stated commitments to freedom and the rule of law, Myanmar stood poised to end its persistent patterns of rights violations and to consolidate democratic gains, said a top human rights expert at a Headquarters press conference today.

A pattern of violations had emerged regarding Iran’s treatment of civil society actors — including political dissidents – that spoke to unfair trials and the targeting of human rights defenders, and the best strategy for substantially improving those conditions was not to penalize the Government, but rather engage it in dialogue that would evolve over time, said the United Nations special investigator on that country.

The prolonged occupation of Palestinian territories presented extraordinary problems for the protection of the human rights and required stronger protection measures, particularly for the welfare of children, a United Nations expert told correspondents at Headquarters this afternoon.

Among several concerns about the human rights situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Special Rapporteur Marzuki Darusman highlighted today the food security situation there, as well as the situation of asylum-seekers from that country.

Ion Botnaru, Director of the General Assembly and Economic and Social Council Affairs Division, announced during a Headquarters news conference this afternoon the names of the nine countries vying for the soon-to-be-vacant five non-permanent seats on the Security Council. He also announced the names of candidates for upcoming elections to fill seats on the Economic and Social Council and the International Court of Justice.

There was no universal standard for the definition of long-term and other abusive forms of solitary confinement, but there was no doubt that it should be banned as torture, three human rights experts said at a Headquarters press conference this afternoon.

The Bureau of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People issued the following statement today, 13 October:

Following the historic submission on 23 September of the application of Palestine for admission to membership in the United Nations, it was time for the natural, historic and legal right of the Palestinians to join the community of nations to be granted, Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations, told the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People today.

To halt all nuclear testing, the international community must aim to launch the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 2012 through political will and concrete action, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged today at the seventh so-called “Article XIV” Conference to facilitate the instrument’s operation.