A majority of the 191-member General Assembly agreed to a special session this month to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, the United Nations announced on Tuesday.
Members were polled by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the request of the United States and with the support of Russia, Hungary, Canada and European Union nations to convene the meeting on Jan. 24, believed the first of its kind in recent memory.
Soviet Red Army troops freed the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland on Jan. 27, 1945. The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is to be observed this year as Holocaust Memorial Day.
"This will be an important occasion since the United Nations was founded as the world was learning the full horror of the camps, and is dedicated to doing everything in its power to protect human dignity and prevent any such horror from happening again," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
"He (Annan) calls on all member states to give the session their full support," Dujarric said.
U.S. Ambassador John Danforth, in a Dec. 10 letter to Annan, said the General Assembly should convene three days before the official anniversary to avoid conflicting commemorations in Auschwitz.
Annan received 111 letters supporting the meeting "and they are still coming in," spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. Only 96 were needed to convene the session.
Six million Jews were exterminated in the concentration camps and millions of others -- including Poles, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners and Gypsies -- were killed, imprisoned or used as slave labor.
A session on the Holocaust would mark a change for the General Assembly, which sets aside several days a year for resolutions on the rights of Palestinians and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat and the only holocaust survivor in the U.S. Congress, visited Annan last month to lobby for the event.
Lantos survived by serving as a 15-year-old messenger for Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi death camps near of the end of World War II. Wallenberg is the uncle of Nane Annan, the wife of the secretary-general.
Source: Reuters
12.01.2005