General Assembly

Acting without a vote, a meeting of States Parties to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights this afternoon elected MahjoubEl Haiba ( Morocco) to membership of the Human Rights Committee, to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Mohammed Ayat ( Morocco) from the Committee before the expiration of his term on 31 December 2012.

Twenty-two Member States pledged approximately $58 million today, during a pledging conference in support of United Nations development activities for 2010.

In the final analysis, said General Assembly President Ali Abdussalam Treki of yesterday’s 114 votes in favour of the resolution on follow-up to the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict -- there was great support for the text.

Announcing that proceeds from a re-release of the 1960s anthem “Give Peace a Chance” will be donated to the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund, Heraldo Muñoz of Chile, Chairman of the Peacebuilding Commission, called for more private-sector aid to countries emerging from conflict, at a Headquarters press conference this morning.

“2010 is going to be a historical year for the biodiversity family,” Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, said, as he launched the logos for the International Year on Biodiversity and the tenth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties, to be held in Nagoya, Japan, next October.

A high-level United Nations conference on South-South cooperation is to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 1-3 December, 2009, the General Assembly has decided.

The human rights situation in Myanmar remained alarming, with a pattern of widespread and systematic violations that prevailing impunity allowed to continue, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar said today.

“There isn’t an internationally recognized right that some company somewhere hasn’t violated,” John Ruggie, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, said today during a Headquarters press conference.

During a Headquarters press conference this afternoon, Angela Kane, Under-Secretary-General for Management, and United Nations Controller, Jun Yamazaki, presented a mixed picture as they outlined the Organization’s financial health, its proposed budget, and recent reform and management initiatives.

The time had come to adopt a United Nations convention on rights of detainees, Manfred Nowak, Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, told correspondents at Headquarters today. “In so many countries”, he said, “States are not living up to their obligations to respect the basic dignity of human beings in detention.”