VIENNA, 7 March — United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in a message delivered this morning by the Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Maxwell Gaylard, said that urgently addressing the plight of Palestinian political prisoners was “very important” to reaching a just and lasting peace, and that he had publicly urged the release of prisoners — numbered in the tens of thousands — last year during a visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel.

Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message to the United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine, delivered by Maxwell Gaylard, Deputy United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, in Vienna, 7 March:

The General Assembly decided this afternoon on new rules for the election of the 36 members of the Executive Board of the World Food Programme (WFP).

The Fifth Committee today approved the work plan for a three-week resumed session that will let delegates consider a Capital Master Plan now running more than $80 million over budget, the work of the Joint Inspection Unit, special political missions and other issues with financial implications for the 2010-2011 budget cycle.

The United Nations Meeting on the Question of Palestine this afternoon turned its attention to the bleak situation and conditions of confinement for Palestinians in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, as it continued its examination of the urgent need to address the political prisoners’ plight.

With the fate of the world’s nearly 7 billion people hanging in the balance, the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development would offer an historic opportunity to define the contours of a “green economy” and consider whether the existing institutional framework could adequately address all the cross-cutting issues affecting human well-being, speakers said today as they kicked off the second session of the Preparatory Committee for the Conference.

Following are UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s remarks to the International Women’s Day forum on “Investing in Women and Entrepreneurship”, in New York, 8 March:

The central role of the Palestinian political prisoners in the enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominated discussion in today’s United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine, as expert panellists shifted the discourse to the legal aspects of the arrests and detentions.

The notion that delivering security would ultimately yield a Palestinian State actually excluded Palestinians from the political process, the International Meeting on the Question of Palestine heard today as it concluded its work with an examination of the link between the political prisoners and the broader Israeli-Palestinian political process, and adoption of an outcome document.