Meetings Coverage

The Economic and Social Council opened the management meetings of its 2019 session today with the election of members to several subsidiary bodies.

Convening two years after the adoption of a landmark strategic plan for the planet’s woodlands, the United Nations Forum on Forests opened its fourteenth annual session today amid renewed commitments to expand forest cover, reduce greenhouse‑gas emissions and improve the lives of some 1.6 billion forest‑dependent people around the world.

The Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) opened the second part of its resumed seventy‑second session today with several speakers insisting that the Secretary-General’s proposal to cut a total of $382.2 million from the United Nations peacekeeping budget for 2019/20 must not come at the expense of delivering mandates authorized by the Security Council.

SAINT GEORGE’S, Grenada, 4 May – The process of eradicating colonialism can only be completed if the actions called for by the General Assembly are fully implemented, Grenada’s Foreign Minister said today, as the Caribbean Regional Seminar on Decolonization concluded its work.

SAINT GEORGE’S, Grenada, 3 May – Participants expressed diverging views today over the manner in which Charter principles of the United Nations such as self-determination and territorial integrity apply to Western Sahara, the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) and Gibraltar, as the Caribbean Regional Seminar on Decolonization entered its second day.

The Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues concluded its eighteenth session this afternoon, approving several recommendations which reflected this year’s central theme, Indigenous Peoples’ Traditional Knowledge:  Generation, transmission and protection.

SAINT GEORGE’S, Grenada, 2 May – Opening the Caribbean Regional Seminar on Decolonization today, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for renewed commitment to accelerating efforts to end colonialism by 2020.

The Department of Global Communications is counting on Member States to help it accelerate the pace of modernization and improve the ways it informs the world about the work of the United Nations in an era of challenge for multilateralism, the Committee on Information heard today.

Despite scattered gains in land, language and legal rights, a glaring lack of political will around the world is inhibiting fundamental change on the ground in thousands of communities in every region, delegates told the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues today as it continued its work.

As the Committee on Information entered the second day of its forty-first session today, speakers took opposing stances on the Special Information Programme on the Question of Palestine — which the Department of Global Communications oversees — while also spotlighting the potential negative impact of fake news on international relations.