Meetings Coverage

Crimes in the Darfur region of Sudan would not stop unless the Security Council and parties to the Rome Statute showed robust determination to apprehend their authors, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said today, imploring the 15-member body to press Sudanese authorities to arrest and surrender persons against whom arrest warrants had been issued.

The Second Committee (Economic and Financial) concluded its work today as it approved 10 draft resolutions that will soon go before the General Assembly.

A mix of consensus and recorded votes characterized the General Assembly’s consideration today of Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) drafts, which culminated in the adoption of 29 resolutions and decisions, including a new one on special political missions and a range of texts on, among others, the Palestine refugee agency, effects of atomic radiation, and national legislation relevant to the peaceful exploration and use of outer space.

After 22 years of conflict, the people of Somalia were not only ready, but desperate to rise to the challenge of building strong State institutions, the senior United Nations official in that country said in a briefing to the Security Council today.

The 2013 United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights was awarded today to five individuals and one judicial body at the General Assembly’s commemorative meeting to mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Security Council today renewed and adjusted the arms embargo it originally imposed on Liberia in 2003, deciding that notification for the provision of non-lethal materials and associated training was no longer required.

The Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today took stock of the financing requirements for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia, as it heard Secretariat officials shed light on progress in completing those bodies’ work and the transferring of their functions to a residual mechanism.

Four of its five outgoing members — Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Morocco and Pakistan — briefed the Security Council this afternoon on the work of the subsidiary bodies they had chaired during their two-year tenure, highlighting significant gains made and the challenges ahead.

Addressing the situation in Guinea-Bissau today, the Security Council strongly deplored the repeated military interferences in civilian affairs and called for respect of the constitutional order, including the electoral process.

It was urgent for the world to come together to sustainably safeguard the health of its oceans, which covered two thirds of the Earth’s surface, connected 90 per cent of the population, provided 350 million jobs, and had 1 billion people in developing countries dependent on the fish those waters yielded, delegates in the General Assembly heard today prior to adopting two related draft resolutions.