Un wolrd summit 2005

Secretary-General of the United Nations: In four days’ time, the United Nations will be 60 years old.  Throughout those 60 years, its mission has remained constant:  to serve the cause of peace, advance development, and defend the dignity of every human being.

But the world has changed.  To achieve its mission in the twenty-first century, the United Nations must reflect those changes. It must adapt to new realities, and be equipped to deal with new challenges.

This is so, whether we are fighting disease and hunger, or working to strengthen democracy; whether we are advancing human rights and the rule of law, or combating terrorism; whether we are building peace, or making the United Nations more effective and more accountable to the peoples it exists to serve.They agreed that development, security and human rights are not only vitally important in their own right, but that they reinforce each other.

They achieved an historic breakthrough by expressing their will to act collectively, through the Security Council, when a population is threatened with genocide, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity.

They agreed to replace thelargely dysfunctional Human Rights Commission with a new Human Rights Council, which will have an all-encompassing responsibility for “promoting universal respect for the protection of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction of any kind”.

And they reaffirmed a strong and unambiguous resolve to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

They gaveeffect to that resolve through a range of measures -- from pledging an additional $50 billion a year by 2010 for fighting poverty, to a promise by all developing countries to adopt national plans for achieving the Goals by 2006; from agreement to provide immediate support for quick-impact initiatives on anti-malaria efforts, education, and health care, to a commitment to innovative sources offinancing for development; from agreement to consider additional measures to ensure long-term debt sustainability, to commitment to trade liberalization.
If we succeed, we will improve the opportunities for all human beings to build better lives.  

WORLD SUMMIT OUTCOME ‘REAL STEP FORWARD’ FOR UN, DEPUTY SECRETARY-GENERAL TELLS AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

DeputySecretary-General Louise Fréchette to the Australian Institute for International Affairs:

the UN can’t build utopia, or solve all the world’s problems, but we want the UN to work effectively because we believe in strengthening international law, we value international cooperation, and we support the Organization’s work

Are they right to do so?  I think they are.  Because the forcesat work in today’s world mean that, for good or ill, we are all dependent on each other.  Pick almost any issue confronting our world today:  terrorism, nuclear proliferation, AIDS, bird flu, disaster response, global warming, poverty, trade.  These issues affect us all, and we can’t address any of them without agreeing on norms, forging common strategies, and sharing burdens.

One of themain reasons the United Nations is under the spotlight today is precisely because, in our interdependent world, people have high expectations of it.  People value the UN as a forum for dialogue, but they are not content with it being only a talk-shop.  They want results, and rightly so.

It was with this goal in mind that, seven months ago, Secretary-General Kofi Annan put before theMember States an agenda for bold change, and called for decisions at last month’s World Summit in New York.  You may have read that the World Summit was a failure.  It was not.  True, it did not achieve the kind of across-the-board transformation that the Secretary-General wanted.  But it did achieve quite a bit.  Let me explain how.

The Secretary-General is convinced that development,...