Meetings Coverage

Taking up a range of topics, the Fifth Committee was told today that it was “imperative” to have a support system in place for United Nations personnel that had survived malicious acts, natural disasters and other emergencies, and to coordinate with families of deceased staff members.

Gender inequality and discrimination were key drivers of women’s and girl’s increased vulnerability to HIV infection, and while various global commitments had been made, national interventions had not been implemented on a scale that made a true difference in prevention, the Commission on the Status of Women heard today as it addressed health and related issues on its last day of high-level debate.

While recognizing measures taken by the Mexican Government to reconcile the country’s national legislation with its obligations under international human rights treaties, experts on the Human Rights Committee today expressed concern that the means of addressing incompatibilities between those treaties and laws below the constitutional level remained unclear.

Concluding its seven-day session, the Special Committee charged with weighing proposals to enhance the United Nations Charter today adopted its 2010 report, containing recommendations directed at the General Assembly.

Addressing the Commission on the Status of Women’s fifty-fourth session this afternoon, Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro said the General Assembly’s proposal to create a United Nations body for gender issues was an historic opportunity to give women a stronger voice in global governance and policymaking.

While implementing the Beijing Platform for Action had been hamstrung by severe resource constraints and a lack of will to combat entrenched stereotypes, more and more women were participating in high-level political decision-making in their countries, with some of the biggest gains made in Africa and Latin America, speakers in the Commission on the Status of Women said today in continued debate.

While Mexico was working to build a participatory democracy that protected fundamental freedoms, the Government faced complex challenges in closing gaps in human rights legislation and reforming the laws, policies, and practices that gave rise to them, a senior official in Mexico’s Interior Ministry told the Human Rights Committee today as it began its ninety-sixth session.

As the international community grappled with the global financial crisis, officials in countries from Chile to Ireland were stepping up efforts to economically empower and improve the workplace status of their female citizens, delegates and a senior United Nations official said today as the fifty-fourth session of the Commission on the Status of Women continued.

Guinea-Bissau was experiencing a relatively stable political environment and growing international attention, which offered the country an unprecedented window of opportunity that should not be missed, the senior United Nations official in the country told the Security Council today.

Responding to the Secretary-General’s report on a proposed “accountability system”, speakers in the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today urged that more attention be given to what the United Nations leadership could do to foster a sense of personal responsibility among staff, in order to better address what some saw as weak links between resource allocation and desired results.