UN Still Won't Hold General Assembly Emergency Special Session on Syrian Carnage

On October 13, 2016, Canada requested (on behalf of 70 UN member states) that the General Assembly hold a meeting to address the humanitarian crisis in Syria. It was the most they could manage given the General Assembly's refusal – after five years of horror – to hold an "emergency special session" on Syria. There have only been ten emergency special sessions of the General Assembly, five of which have been on Israel alone. The last one – to condemn Israel – has been reconvened 16 times since it started in 1997.

So despite 400,000 + dead in Syria, the General Assembly managed to have merely a 3 hour "Informal meeting of the General Assembly to hear a briefing by the Secretary-General and his Special Envoy on Syria, Mr. Staffan de Mistura, on the situation in Syria."

Here is all UN officials could muster at the informal meeting on October 20, 2016:

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated: "I call on all of you to cooperate and fulfill your collective responsibility to protect."

The UN Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura said: "...let's hope that the bombing continues to be stopped on both sides...If it does not, I think it would be time for a special session of the General Assembly if the Security Council doesn't have the capacity of unifying themselves in stopping this horror."

A day later on October 21, 2016, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights told the UN Human Rights Council only: "Responsibility for halting the Syrian crisis rests primarily with the Security Council, but not exclusively, so the General Assembly may also have a role."