The real impact of the global financial and economic crisis had yet to be faced, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, President of the General Assembly, said at Headquarters today.
General Assembly: Press Conference
With the General Assembly holding its first ever thematic debate on the responsibility to protect populations from genocide or other war crimes, a diverse panel of academics struggled today during a press conference to find common ground on how the concept, seen by some developing nations as a Western ploy to meddle in their domestic affairs, could ever be fairly or effectively applied.
The responsibility to protect was focused on non-indifference and making it everyone’s responsibility to ensure that no one would ever again have to look back with the mixture of emotions that had greeted the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur, asking, “How did we let this happen?”, Gareth Evans, Co-Chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, said at a Headquarters press conference today.
The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, fearing that in the midst of the global financial crisis the rights of elderly women would fall by the wayside, was encouraging States parties to the women’s Convention to mainstream older women’s concerns into national strategies and development programmes, Committee Chairperson and expert from Egypt, Naela Mohamed Gabr, said this afternoon during a Headquarters press conference.
Security Council reform had come a long way since the beginning a new intergovernmental negotiation process in February, the facilitator on that issue in the General Assembly said at a Headquarters press conference today, announcing a third round of talks to begin on 27 August.
General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann said the international community should be “very happy” about the outcome of the Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development, which had affirmed the 192-member body as the most suitable venue for discussion of serious economic matters.
General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann said that the global conversation begun this week achieved what many believed to be unachievable, at a Headquarters press conference to announce the adoption of an outcome document meant to spark a redesign of the world’s financial and economic architecture.
The outcome of the Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development in its third day at United Nations Headquarters provided a means for continued discussion, but in no way measured up to the extreme gravity of the situation facing developing countries, representatives of civil society groups told correspondents today, also at Headquarters.
General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann today strongly condemned the attempted coup against the democratically elected Government of President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, calling it a serious threat to democratic rule there, according to a statement delivered late today at a Headquarters press conference.
Negotiations on the long-debated outcome document for the United Nations summit on the world financial crisis, which begins tomorrow, had come to a successful conclusion, General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann announced this morning at a Headquarters press conference.