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Late Breaking News on Habitat II

Last updated 14 June 1996 --

Delegates held informal negotiations throughout the day and night Thursday in an effort to agree to remaining bracketed text in the Habitat Agenda, delaying into Friday morning Committee I's final meeting. After midnight, brackets remained around text on subjects including: reproductive health; democracy, transparent and accessible governance; and "documented" or "legal" migrants.

The group negotiating Agenda implementation and followup had resolved all issues except whether to include description of the executive secretary of the UN Centre for Human Settlements and the Centre's relationship to the UN Administrative Committee on Coordination.

The drafting group on an Istanbul Declaration also continued into the wee hours of Friday. Among outstanding issues in that discussion where the use of "equity" and/or "equality," reference to "the family" or "families" and resource and implementation issues.

Details on debate from the Conference's tenth day are in Friday's Earth Negotiations Bulletin from Habitat II, which may not be available for a while due to the late finish of negotiations.

Editor's Note: The ENB's photo coverage has been unfortunately interrupted. Our roving camera was last seen touring Istanbul, all by itself in the back of a taxi where I left it. Stay tuned. (-=- sw)
To catch up on the Conference to date, check out Late Breaking News from We will continue our live coverage of Habitat II through 14 June. We have recorded RealAudio interviews and daily issues in English and French of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin. More pictures (maybe) and sound coming soon. Stay tuned!!

ENB will not be covering most of the Plenary statements. These statements and official press releasesare available on the Conference Secretariat's WWW site.

Here is the conference document that is being debated in Istanbul.

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The Third Session of the Preparatory Committee for the UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) ended in New York during February. Although the spirit of negotiation was good, procedural bottlenecks and the volume of work to be finished produced less than favorable results.

The Earth Negotiations Bulletin prepared a comprehensive summary of the Third Session of the PrepCom, which includes an analysis of the process through PrepCom 3.

In addition, we have posted RealAudio recordings of the final statements If you have any late-breaking news, updates or recent material on Habitat II, send us e-mail at enb@igc.apc.org

We published daily issues of the Earth Negotiations Bulletinin French and English from New York. Our daily issues are 2000-word summaries of the official proceedings.

Here is a link to the UN's gopher for press releases on Human Settlements.