JUBA – South Sudan’s Vice President for Service Cluster Josephine Lagu and her accompanying delegation left for the United States on Thursday to attend the UN General Assembly, the foreign ministry said.
Amb. Apuk Ayuel, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, disclosed during her weekly media briefing that the vice president left for New York shortly after briefing President Salva Kiir.
Amb. Apuk said the delegation will hold side meetings while in the U.S to reaffirm the country’s commitment to peace and development.
World leaders are converging at United Nations headquarters on the East River in Manhattan, New York for what promises to be one of the most consequential annual gatherings in recent memory.
Representatives of the 193 UN Member States and other organizations will deliver speeches at the organization’s general debate in the grandeur of the storied General Assembly Hall, as a series of high-level meetings are held on key issues facing humanity.
With the weight of global crises from war and climate change to gender inequality and the ethical dilemmas of artificial intelligence, the UN said this high-level week is a vital moment for humanity to reflect, recommit, and reimagine its collective future.
The general debate, which gets underway on 23 September, is for many the centerpiece of the General Assembly session. World leaders take to the podium in front of the gilded backdrop to the Assembly Hall to elaborate on their priorities to a global audience.
The notional and voluntary time limit for each speech to enable the efficient scheduling of 193+ speakers over a seven-day period is 15 minutes, but it is rarely faithfully adhered to.
The South Sudan delegation will update the assembly about the political, security and humanitarian situation in the country, which is characterized by worsening violence, political crisis and relief access impediments.
South Sudan’s address will also be overshadowed by the recent bombshell UN report which found that systemic government corruption, implicating Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel and other political elites, has siphoned tens of billions of dollars of public revenue and unleashed immense crises that must be urgently addressed.
Titled “Plundering a Nation: How Rampant Corruption Unleashed a Human Rights Crisis in South Sudan,” the report is based on two years of independent investigations and analysis by the Commission.
