At its twenty-ninth session, the General Assembly, in Resolution 3272 (XXIX) on the elaboration of a draft Convention on Territorial Asylum, decided to establish a Group of Experts on the Draft Convention on Territorial Asylum. The Group of Experts met in 1975 to review the text of a draft Convention on Territorial Asylum. This Report of the 1977 United Nations Conference on Territorial Asylum contains the recommendation of the Conference that the General Assembly of the United Nations at its thirty-second session consider the question of convening at an appropriate time a further session of the Conference since the Conference was unable to carry out its mandate concerning the draft Convention within the allocated time. The major annex to the Report is the Report of the Committee of the Whole. The Report of the Committee of the Whole has an introduction describing its activities. Section II of the Report deals with each proposed or existing new article of the draft Convention in separate subsections. The subsections deal with: Article I (grant of asylum), Article 2 (application), new article on the question of activities of asylees, new article on the question of family reunion, Article 3 (non-refoulement). Each subsection of Section II first sets out the text as proposed by the Group of Experts or the text (or texts) of a proposed new article. It then lists the texts of relevant amendments with an indication of the manner in which they were disposed of. It finally describes the proceedings of the Committee of the Whole. The text of articles and amendments submitted up to that point which had not yet been considered by the Committee are reproduced in an appendix to the Report of the Committee. A Note by the Secretary-General to the Conference refers to a select bibliography on territorial asylum which is contained in the documents to the Conference.

The publication is an international standard on the design and operation of an efficient and accurate vital statistics system at national level. It provides guidelines on collection, compiling and disseminating vital statistics. More specifically it contains (a) basic principles for a vital statistics system; (b) uses of vital statistics and civil registration records; (c) topics to be covered in a vital statistics system; (d) sources of vital statistics and how they function; (e) quality assurance in the vital statistics system and (f) strategies in improving civil registration and vital statistics systems in countries. It also informs policy makers and the general public on the importance of vital statistics and hence further improving the vital statistics system.

Selected from the papers presented at the twenty-third International Social Philosophy Conference held in July of 2006 at University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia --Preface.