Meetings Coverage

The Security Council must continue to improve its openness to non-Council-Member States, temporary members and the general public while ensuring its ability to act effectively and efficiently, speakers said in a day-long debate on the body’s working methods, in its chambers today.

“The violations of indigenous peoples are deep, systemic and widespread,”United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, told the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues today, as he briefed delegates on the second year of his mandate.

The Israeli policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory did not give any indication of change, the Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations told the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People today. Riyad Mansour said that Israel continued on the path of violating international law, including international humanitarian law, particularly with regard to the continuation of settlement activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Corroborating reports that indigenous Guaraní communities in South America’s vast Chaco region -- shared by Bolivia and Paraguay -- continued to be routinely chased off their lands, pressed into debt bondage and forced to live in squalor, members of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues called today on both Governments to take full responsibility for ending forced labour and expropriation of ancestral lands and territories.

The devastating impacts of logging, mining and land conversion had displaced indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands, commercialized their cultures and politically repressed their leaders, speakers in the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues stressed today, as they pressed the 16-member advisory body -– and their Governments -- for help in achieving equitable and “restorative” development in their countries.

The annual United Nations forum on indigenous issues opened today with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calling on Member States to promote development while respecting indigenous cultures and traditions, and with the Government of New Zealand taking the opportunity to announce that it would reverse its decision and support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples.

Following recent international action aimed at reducing the threat of nuclear weapons, participants in a special General Assembly debate today looked towards further progress in long-stalled efforts to bolster the control regimes for weapons of mass destruction and conventional arms.

Agreeing unanimously on the centrality of human rights to an effective, fair and humane criminal justice system, the Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice concluded in Salvador, Brazil, today with the adoption of a political declaration calling for greater scrutiny of the rules governing the treatment of prisoners, stronger national child-protection laws and more State action to prevent violence against women and migrant workers, among other issues.

The Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice had put the world’s criminal justice system on trial, but the case could be dismissed for lack of evidence, Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Director-General of the Organization’s Vienna Office, said today, as the event’s high-level segment continued in Salvador, Brazil.

Delegates at a special, three-day segment of the Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice urged members this afternoon to take concrete action in the next five years, building upon “spectacular breakthroughs” on controversial issues relating to the prosecution, sentencing and custody of offenders, and on a possible new treaty on emerging forms of transnational offences such as cybercrime.