Meetings Coverage

The General Assembly today elected by acclamation John William Ashe, the Permanent Representative of Antigua and Barbuda to the United Nations, as President of its sixty-eighth session.

The senior United Nations official in Kosovo and Security Council members alike today hailed last April’s historic agreement between that territory and Serbia as a step towards normalized bilateral relations, stability in the Balkan region and integration into the European Union.

The General Assembly today adopted, by a recorded vote of 62 in favour to 16 against, with 84 abstentions, a resolution that recognized the right of return for all refugees and internally displaced persons to their homes in Georgia, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

States must strike a balance between the sustainable protection of the world’s oceans and their reasonable exploitation as sources of food, energy and employment for billions of people around the globe, stressed delegates as the States Parties to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea concluded their twenty-third Meeting today.

Rather than letting cultural differences create divisions, the international community now had the opportunity to integrate cultural traditions into a post-2015 development agenda that would bolster human rights and spur economic growth, speakers said today as the General Assembly held its High-level Thematic Debate on Culture and Development.

There would be “no question of Gibraltar being handed over to Spain” — Gibraltar’s Chief Minister told the Special Committee on Decolonization today, as it considered questions of that Non-Self-Governing Territory and of Western Sahara.

The Hague branch of the new global residual mechanism for criminal tribunals tasked with prosecuting war crimes committed during the 1990s Balkans wars and the 1994 Rwanda genocide was set to assume the functions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on 1 July, as scheduled, the President of both of those bodies assured the Security Council this afternoon.

The budget review process for the international tribunal for maritime affairs should be brought up to more efficient and effective standards, said delegates today in the Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on the Law of the Sea as it continued its twenty-third session.

“Yemen is in the heart of its transition,” the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on that country told the Security Council today, while cautioning that there were no guarantees for what lay ahead.

The fact that AIDS was “no longer a certain death sentence” proved that by working together and scaling up urgency and commitment, the international community stood a chance of ridding the world of the epidemic, the representative of the United States said today, as the General Assembly concluded its implementation review of the Declaration of Commitment and the Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS.