General Assembly

Updating the press on the latest developments regarding the work of the sixty-fifth General Assembly, Joseph Deiss, the 192-member body’s President, today highlighted a host of upcoming topical debates and took questions on the push for Palestinian statehood, as well as on the status of the negotiations to reform and expand the Security Council.

The Secretary-General of the upcoming Fourth United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries characterized negotiations towards commitments for development assistance to those countries as making “encouraging but slow progress”, as the second session of the Intergovernmental Preparatory Committee closed this afternoon.

In a brief organizational meeting today, the United Nations Disarmament Commission elected Knut Langeland (Norway) as Chair of its Working Group I, dedicated to “recommendations for achieving the objective of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons”.

Concrete action towards the goal of complete nuclear disarmament, while guaranteeing the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, was urgently needed — both to ensure a safer world and to prove the value of the “struggling” Disarmament Commission, whose reputation had been tarnished by years of inaction, delegates said today, as they wrapped up the general debate of its 2011 substantive session.

Despite an eleven-year stalemate in the Disarmament Commission over ways to achieve nuclear disarmament and wide scepticism that confidence-building measures in the field of conventional arms would also remain elusive, hope remained for achieving consensus on each item of that body’s painstakingly agreed agenda, said Sergio Duarte, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs as he opened the Commission’s 2011 substantive session.

The Secretary-General of the upcoming Fourth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries called on Member States to intensify their efforts to forge a programme of action that would have concrete results in improving the lives of people in the poorest States, as he opened the second Intergovernmental Preparatory Meeting for the Conference this morning.

Noting the similarities between Latin America’s politically repressive and violent past and the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, representatives of non-governmental organizations attending a United Nations Meeting in the Uruguayan capital today called on Latin American and Caribbean civil society to work together to help resolve the conflict in the Holy Land and bring justice to the Palestinian people.

The United Nations expert body monitoring worldwide implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights concluded its 101st session at Headquarters in New York today, having taken up the compliance reports of Mongolia, Serbia, Slovakia and Togo.

The United Nations Latin American and Caribbean Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace closed today in Montevideo, Uruguay with an urgent call to the parties to resume serious negotiations to resolve permanent status issues within an agreed timeframe and to Israel to fully and immediately cease all settlement activity in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.

The 18-member Human Rights Committee was briefed today by Yuji Iwasawa, expert from Japan, on the results of the Inter-Committee Meeting Working Group on Follow-up, held in Geneva from 12 to 14 January 2011.