General Assembly

Twenty Member States pledged approximately $265 million today at an event in support of United Nations development activities for 2012. Opening the 2011 Pledging Conference, Navid Hanif, Acting Director of the Office of Economic and Social Council Support and Coordination in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, noted that the ever-deepening global economic and financial crisis was taking a heavy toll on human development and risked rolling back decades of gains.

Faiza Patel, Chair of the Human Rights Council’s Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination, told correspondents today about the Working Group’s visits to Equatorial Guinea, South Africa and Iraq.

An overhaul of inequitable agricultural business models was needed to reduce global poverty and ensure long-term sustainability for farmers and farm systems, said an independent United Nations food expert at a New York Headquarters press conference today.

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.

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.

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.