Thailand's name picked to set seating arrangement for General Assembly session

In an annual ceremony performed in advance of an upcoming session of the United Nations General Assembly, Thailand was selected to occupy a front-row spot that will determine the order of seating in the General Assembly Hall during the sixtieth session of the UN's main deliberative body that begins in September.

As a result of a drawing conducted by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Thailand will replace St. Kitts-Nevis in the seat that serves as a starting point for an alphabetically arranged seating of Member State delegations in the hall where the Assembly holds its high-level general debate and plenary meetings.

The Assembly's next session will open with a summit on 14 September, providing an expected 170 world leaders with what the Secretary-General has called a "once in a generation opportunity" to forge a global consensus on development, security, human rights and UN renewal.

The three-day forum, officially known as the High-Level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly, is built around a five-year review of worldwide progress towards attaining the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of ambitious targets, ranging from halving extreme poverty, to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and to providing universal primary education, all by 2015. It will also take up the package of reforms Mr. Annan introduced to the Assembly last March.

In his report "In Lager Freedom," Mr. Annan urged world leaders to take decisive action during the September summit on a "bold but achievable" blueprint for making the UN more efficient at tackling global problems, including by establishing new rules for the use of military force, adopting an anti-terrorism treaty, and reforming key UN organs and institutions, such as the Security Council and the Geneva-based Commission on Human Rights.