The General Assembly has reelected renowned Swiss legal expert Lucius Caflisch for a second five-year-term to the International Law Commission. Lucius Caflisch is a professor of international law, a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights and a former legal adviser of the Swiss Foreign Ministry. He is the first Swiss national to be elected to the Geneva-based International Law Commission, a body of 34 independent members tasked to contribute to the development of international law and its codification

The Swiss delegation during “high-level week” at the UN is led by Micheline Calmy-Rey, President of the Confederation. Mrs. Calmy-Rey participates in UN meetings on non-communicable diseases, desertification and terrorism and speaks in the general debate of the plenary on September 21, 2011. On September 20, she will preside over a ministerial meeting of the "Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie” which Switzerland currently presides. During her stay in New York, President of the Confederation Calmy-Rey will attend a series of bilateral meetings.

 President of the Swiss Confederation Micheline Calmy-Rey at the 66th UN General Assembly in New York 

 Concertation ministérielle sous présidence suisse à l’ONU sur les transitions politiques majeures dans l’espace francophone

With the symbolical handover of the gavel to his successor, Nasser Abdulaziz al-Nasser from Qatar, former President of the Swiss Confederation Joseph Deiss ended his term as President of the 65th General Assembly (PGA). In his closing speech, Mr. Deiss told the plenary to always keep striving to determine the common interest, to defend basic values and to respond to the real concerns of peoples. “I am convinced that for all human beings whose dignity has been harmed or whose integrity is threatened, whether in Syria or elsewhere in the world, the Assembly of peoples that we constitute must at least be a moral refuge, reassuring them that their cause is not forgotten, that we uphold their aspirations and that they have the right to hope”’, Mr. Deiss said.

Upon the election of Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser from Qatar as President of the sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly, his predecessor Joseph Deiss, President (“PGA”) of the current sixty-fifth session, presented him with a "PGA Handbook". The book, published by the Permanent Mission of Switzerland, describes the rules, procedures, regulations and practices of the General Assembly which are scattered among various United Nations documents in a simple, easily understandable manner. In his foreword, President Deiss expresses his hopes that the handbook would contribute to the preservation of the institutional memory of the President's Office and would become a useful tool for all those working with the General Assembly. The handbook is distributed by the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to all Permanent Missions and to United Nations offices and bodies dealing with the General Assembly.

With a group of eleven Member States Switzerland presented a set of proposals for strengthening the Security Council sanctions regime targeted at supporters of Al Qaida and Taliban. Individuals subject to such sanctions cannot travel and have no access to their bank accounts. As this amounts to quasi-penal measures and as there is no due process (review, appeal) available, courts have begun to back challenges of the sanctions system despite the fact that UN sanctions are binding for Member States. The proposals of Austria, Belgium, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland are aimed at making the sanctions regime more accountable. “The like-minded group does not want to weaken the regime”, Swiss Permanent Representative Paul Seger told Member States, “We want to strengthen it”.

Today, Switzerland signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. This convention, negotiated in 2006 and entered into force on 23 December 2010, is a central new human rights instrument of the UN. Worldwide, over 52 000 cases of have been reported where a person, upon order or complicity of a government, has gone missing and whose fate remains unknown. Over 42 000 of those cases remain unresolved. States parties to the convention are obliged to treat every enforced disappearance as an unjustifiable violation of human rights. The convention also requires States parties to take a series of measures to help prevent enforced disappearances and to bring perpetrators to justice. Switzerland played an active role in promoting the drafting of the Convention. While Swiss legislation is compatible with aims and purposes of the Convention, due to the Swiss federal legal system some technical legal amendments may be necessary before ratification.