Meetings Coverage

Welcoming progress made so far in “fully fledged negotiations” between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders, the Security Council this morning called on them to intensify the momentum of the talks as it extended the mandate of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) until 15 December 2011.

With the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea steadily approaching universal participation, the twenty-first Meeting of States Parties to that treaty opened today with the election of several Bureau members and the adoption of the provisional agenda for its week-long session.

Welcoming the progress made in the prevention, management and resolution of conflict and in post-conflict peacebuilding in a number of African countries, the General Assembly today called for intensified, better coordinated efforts between national Governments, the African Union, subregional organizations, the United Nations system and partners “with a view to achieving further progress towards the goal of a conflict-free Africa”.

Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, 2008 Nobel Laureate in Medicine for helping to discover the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), led strong calls at the United Nations today for integrating the global response to AIDS into broader health agendas, and for taking advantage of every opportunity to reach those living with HIV or at risk of infection whenever and wherever they interacted with local health-care delivery systems.

Deeply concerned that AIDS already had claimed 30 million lives and orphaned 16 million children since it was first discovered in 1981, the United Nations General Assembly today promised to partner with all stakeholders to implement “bold and decisive action” to wipe out what remained of an unprecedented global human tragedy despite significant progress in the past decade to combat the disease.

The Security Council this morning extended the mandate of the Panel of Experts helping monitor sanctions on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for an additional year, until 12 June 2012. Acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the Council unanimously adopted resolution 1985 (2011) maintaining the current mandate of the group that it established in June 2009.

Women and girls bore a disproportionate burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and if Governments were serious about halting the disease in the next decade, they must throw their political weight squarely behind that issue by urgently expanding sexual and reproductive health services, legislating gender equality, and understanding that no gains would be made without ending violence against women, said participants today in a General Assembly panel discussion on “Women, girls and HIV”.

Innovative drugs, diagnostics, vaccines and microbicides to treat HIV infection must be developed urgently and made readily available worldwide, particularly to sex workers, homosexual men, intravenous drug users and others who needed them most, participants said this morning during a panel discussion held in connection with this week’s United Nations high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS.

Calling for a “prevention revolution” on the second day of the General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS, ministers and other high-ranking Government officials stressed that programmes to combat the disease must be mainstreamed into national health systems during the next phase of the global response to the pandemic, while emphasizing that those directly affected must be included in the search for solutions.

Urging all States to cooperate fully with the sanctions imposed on Iran over concern about the nature of its nuclear activities, the Security Council today extended for one year the mandate of the Panel of Experts created last year to help monitor the measures’ implementation.