General Assembly

The Bureau of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People adopted the following statement today, 19 August:

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women concluded its work today by adopting observations and recommendations arising from its consideration of eight country reports that it took up during its forty-ninth session.

While many Governments were actively pursuing reforms to dismantle legal barriers holding back women’s empowerment, millions of women still faced an uphill battle in the struggle to undo negative stereotypes, lock down property rights and successfully confront sexual harassment in the workplace, the Chairperson of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women said today.

The Palestinian people had completed their two-year state-building programme, fulfilling a substantial part of their “contract” with the United Nations, and it was now time for the international community to uphold its end of the deal so that they would see the Organization admit their viable and independent State during the General Assembly’s sixty-sixth session, Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer for Palestine, told the Palestinian Rights Committee today.

Condemning Friday’s bombing in Oslo and the shooting massacre at a Norwegian summer camp, delegates and youth advocates said today that this week’s General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on Youth would aim to end such extremist behaviour and guide young people on a path of tolerance and understanding. “We are here to prevent what happened in Norway in the future,” Jean-Francis Zinsou (Benin), a co-facilitator of the Meeting, said at a Headquarters press conference.

Singapore’s delegation to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women asserted today that gender equality was central to the country’s burgeoning socio-economic growth and responded to the Committee’s concerns over trafficking in persons, reservations to the women’s Convention, reinforced stereotypes and other issues, as it presented its latest periodic report.

Ratification by Djibouti of the international women’s Convention in 1999 had sparked a transformation in Djibouti that had “changed the landscape of the country”, the head of the delegation and Minister of the Promotion of Women and Family Planning of Djibouti said today, as the State party appeared before the monitoring Committee for its first-ever periodic review of implementation.

The delegation of Nepal today assured experts of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women that gender violence, discrimination and protection of minorities were being considered in the constitutional process under way and that strong measures were being taken to combat human trafficking and harmful social practices, as that country’s combined fourth and fifth periodic report came under review.

The progress of a general law against gender discrimination, the adequacy of programmes meant to address the low participation of women in elected positions and the vulnerability of divorced migrant women were discussed today by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, as it took up the Republic of Korea’s seventh periodic report.

Defending Ethiopia’s track record in combating harmful traditional practices, improving “degrading” humanitarian conditions in refugee camps and enforcing a law that restricted the provision of humanitarian services to local charities, officials presenting their country’s combined sixth and seventh periodic reports to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women said today that the Government was doing its best to live up to its domestic and international obligations.