The 69th session of the UN General Assembly starts today in New York. The commonly referred to Ministerial Week – when the high level meetings occur – will take place next week.
For most people the UN General Assembly (UNGA) will conjure up newspaper images of that huge hall familiar from television, with rows of delegates in national dress hoping that the cameras won’t spot them looking bored or talking to their friends and usually a World Leader/Dictator at the front making an offensive speech about another country.
That is part of it but not all of it. I was lucky enough to spend a year working as an adviser to the President of the General Assembly. The President is a man sitting at the podium behind the World leader/Dictator. This gave me a unique insight into the General Assembly and full access to all parts of the UN building – designed by Oscar Niemeyer which was good preparation for coming to Brasilia.
The first thing to note is that what you see on television is only one percent of what happens at the General Assembly. The speeches from Presidents and Prime Ministers are important and grab the headlines (sometimes for the wrong reasons) but the real action at UNGA often does not take place in the General Assembly Hall.
These include formal high level events with speeches by heads of state. While at the UN I organised a High Level event on HIV/AIDS which helped to catalyze global action by setting tough targets including the elimination of mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS. Getting to this stage involved a year of hard work involving governments, business, finance, industry, and civil society. In the next week the Secretary General will host a similar meeting on climate change with the aim of building support ahead of negotiations next year on tackling climate change.
Beyond the big meetings there were breakfast meetings and informal huddles of foreign ministers looking to find solutions to the big international problems. You can bet that this year there will be a lot of discussion about the spread of the Ebola virus, how to deal with illegal Russian action in Ukraine and the threat from Islamic extremism in Iraq and Syria.
And there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of bilateral meetings between Presidents, Prime Ministers and others senior officials. These include what are called ‘brush bys’ where the heads of two countries meet for only a couple of minutes.
In the middle of it, it sometimes feels like a giant speed-dating event. But nothing is left to chance, each meeting is carefully planned and organised. Often the route a Prime Minister or President walks to go from one meeting to another has to be planned out to ensure he or she doesn’t end up bumping into the wrong person by mistake. If you were attending a meeting outside the UN complex, you need a lot of luck to ensure you didn’t get stuck on the wrong side of the road as one motorcade after another blocked the route across.
Even though the closest I come to the General Assembly this year is the Lego model I keep in my office of the UN building, I will be keeping a close eye on this year’s proceedings and hoping that progress can be made on some of the massive challenges facing everybody in the international community.