The UN General Assembly approved a two-year budget of US$4.17 billion on Saturday, with the US casting the only vote against the measure because it included financing for a conference the US felt would be prejudicial against Israel.
The vote, taken at 5:55am after days of round-the-clock negotiations, was 142-1.
The US said it was forced to oppose the measure because of the insistence of the Group of 77, a powerful assemblage of 130 developing countries, that the budget provide money for a proposed conference that would be a follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.
The US walked out of the Durban meeting because it said it had become a forum for attacks on Israel.
Mark Wallace, the US ambassador for management, said the US objected to "revisiting an event that was noxious to my country and a disgrace in the international community."
He also said the US was protesting the inclusion in the budget of finances for a conference that was supposed to be paid for voluntarily.
However, in another dispute with the developing-world group, the US succeeded in gaining a last-minute restoration of full financing for an antifraud office that has exposed more than US$600 million in tainted UN contracts and is investigating an additional US$1 billion in suspect agreements.
The original budget proposal had called for shuttering the panel in six months, which its chief, Robert Appleton, said last week would have effectively ended its investigations.
In negotiations between 3am and 4am, Wallace persuaded the Group of 77 leaders to drop language closing down the taskforce on June 30.
Left in the proposal was a call for an audit of the two-year-old taskforce's activities in the past, a particular insistence of Singapore, which has repeatedly accused the antifraud panel of dealing unfairly with a UN official from its country who has been under investigation for two years.
Appleton said on Saturday that he was "honored and delighted" to have more time and that he was not bothered by the audit provision.
The overall budget was a slight reduction from the US$4.2 billion figure proposed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last month, which represented a substantial increase over the US$3.8 billion budget for last year and this year that Ban attributed to the growing demands on the organization.
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