The UN General Assembly has in December last year adopted a resolution related to the report of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor.

The resolution aims to make UN a key player in following up on the Commission’s report published in June 2008. The draft resolution was initially co-sponsored by Norway, along with Guatemala, Nigeria, Indonesia, Madagascar, Switzerland, Spain, Benin, Tanzania, and Mexico. Latter a number of additional countries joined as well.

Under its agenda item on the follow-up to the outcome of the Millennium Summit, the Assembly adopted by consensus a text on the “Legal empowerment of the poor and eradication of poverty”. By a resolution on legal empowerment of the poor and eradication of poverty (document A/63/L.25), the Assembly has reaffirmed the importance of the timely and full realization of development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals.

Recognizing that empowering the poor is essential to effectively eradicating poverty and hunger, and that each country must take primary responsibility for its own development, it has also taken note of the final report of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. Finally by the text, the Assembly has requested the Secretary-General to submit a report at its sixty-fourth session containing issues covered by the Commission and appropriate recommendations.

“Norway supported the Commission’s work. We are pleased that such a wide-ranging group of countries, from the South and North, has come together to ask the UN General Assembly and the Secretary General to pursue this important initiative”, says Paul Klouman Bekken, First Secretary at the Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations.

Read the full text of the resolution