Continued efforts made to improve coordination, respond to change.

• Position: Economic and Social Council

With lively debate, fewer formal speeches, much reduced dispute and increased cooperation, the Economic and Social Council at its 1994 substantive session (27 June-29 July, New York), responded with effectiveness and efficiency to the call for change from the General Assembly.

The five-week meeting dealt expeditiously with a wide range of subjects, including humanitarian assistance, narcotics drugs, tropical diseases, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), and operational activities, said Council President Richard Butler of Australia in concluding remarks.

As proof of its new streamlined efforts, the Council adopted 131 resolutions and decisions during the session, compared to 190 in 1993. The Council's pace had quickened by focusing on action and discussing each subject only once, wherever possible, he said.

A highlight of the session was an endorsement for establishing the joint and co-sponsored UN Programme on HIV/AIDS, to provide global leadership and an internationally coordinated response to the pandemic. In its resolution 1994/24, the Council stressed that the new Programme's activities at the country level should be given priority. The Joint Programme--which is co-sponsored by six UN organizations: UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the World Bank, and the World Health Organization (WHO), the Programme's administrator--is expected to be fully operational by January 1996.

The Council also asked the General Assembly to consider designating 1998 the International Year of the Ocean (resolution 1994/48) and to proclaim the ten-year period beginning 1 January 1995 as the Decade for Human Rights Education (1994/255).

Four segments

During the 1994 session, the 54-member Council followed a new four-segment format, as called for by Assembly resolution 48/162 on further measures for the restructuring and revitalization of the UN in the economic, social and related fields. The Assembly decided that the Council's Economic and Social Committees would be subsumed into the plenary, and the substantive session would consist of four segments: high-level: coordination; operational activities; and a general segment covering mainly social, humanitarian and human rights questions, and economic and environmental questions.

A three-day high-level segment was convened from 27 to 29 June, where the first intergovernmental discussion of the Secretary-General's "An Agenda for Development" took place. A week-long expert review of the new document took place in June at the World Hearings on Development.

Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, introducing the report on 28 June, said that development had meaning only if it had a true spirit of concern for a fairer distribution of wealth. "Development is part of our duty to future generations", he told the high-level gathering. "No one here can say in good conscience that the world today meets all the requirements of this duty. For too large a portion of humanity, life is just a dead end, and the future is nothing but a gulf of despair." The fiftieth anniversary of the UN, he added, must provide "the occasion to rethink and reinvent our policy towards economic and social development".

Among priorities identified were the needs for: concentration on people rather than on capital goods, roads or bridges; and an action-oriented programme, based on a spirit of partnership, with due attention to national specificities.

"In essence there should be a people-centred approach to development, with more invested in their education, health and welfare", Mr. Butler told the press. The Council had agreed...