Elaborating a harmonized post-2015 sustainable development agenda and developing a consultative mechanism between the General Assembly and global economic institutions would top that body’s priorities during its sixty-seventh annual session, said its President during a Headquarters press conference today.

The Secretary-General is alarmed by escalating tensions along the Syrian-Turkish border. As the situation inside Syria deteriorates yet further, the risks of regional conflict and the threat to international peace and security are also increasing. The Secretary-General calls on all concerned to abandon the use of violence, exercise maximum restraint and move towards a political solution.

The Secretary-General delivered the keynote address at the Council of Europe’s World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, in France, today, and said the situation in Syria is posing serious risks to the stability of neighbours and the entire region. He expressed concern about the continued flow of arms to both sides, and urged those countries providing them to stop doing so.

Hailing the strides made in gender justice by the Special Court set up to try atrocities committed during Sierra Leone’s civil war, a top United Nations official today called for the lessons learned during its proceedings to be documented and widely utilized in the continuing fight against impunity.

The Secretary-General has appointed Mr. Romano Prodi of Italy as his Special Envoy for the Sahel, and he looks forward to Mr. Prodi’s leadership in shaping and mobilizing an effective United Nations and international response to the complex crisis plaguing the countries and people of this region.

Leila Zerrougui, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, has condemned in the harshest terms the targeted attack by Taliban gunmen on Pakistani schoolgirls in the Swat Valley, north-west of Islamabad. She said Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which claimed responsibility, must respect the right to education of all children, including girls, to go to school.

Recent data now contradicted several long-held beliefs about wartime sexual violence, including the assumption that rape was widely used as a strategic weapon of war, experts said today as they introduced the 2012 Human Security Report at a Headquarters press conference.

As the situation in Mali’s rebel-controlled north worsened, with reports of systematic executions, amputations and rape, most political leaders and civil society actors agreed that liberating the country must come before holding elections, Ivan Šimonović, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, told reporters at Headquarters today.

Officials launching a United Nations report on very young marriages around the world this morning said it represented a “clarion call” to end a practice that every day cut short the childhoods of 37,000 girls, some as young as 5 years old, ending their education, endangering their health and entering them into a life of drudgery.

This is the first International Day of the Girl Child, and the Secretary-General will mark the occasion by speaking at a high-level panel on child marriage this afternoon. He will say that child marriage can disrupt girls’ education, increase their exposure to abuse, jeopardize their health and result in early and unwanted pregnancies — an often life-threatening risk.