Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-28-Speech-3-270"
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"en.20050928.24.3-270"2
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".
Mr President, two weeks ago at the 2005 World Summit, our Heads of State and Government met to decide how the international community, through the United Nations, should tackle the world's most pressing problems: the interrelated challenges of development, security and human rights.
Under the UK's Presidency, the European Council has continued to press for more international action to increase development aid in the fight against poverty and deprivation. We, the European Union, are already easily the world's largest aid donor: 80% of the extra USD 5 billion of aid pledged at the G8 summit in Gleneagles will come from Europe.
We have also made a historic commitment to double aid to Africa by 2010. We have spearheaded the important agreements reached this year to reduce debt and launch global immunisation programmes against illnesses and diseases in the poorest countries.
There has of course been criticism that not enough progress was made on trade, back at that summit in July. But it will ultimately be through the Doha Development Round that the international community can and must deliver real gains for poor countries by abolishing export subsidies and reducing all barriers to trade, including trade-distorting domestic support. We will work as hard as we can to ensure that political leaders focus on getting results at the WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December and indeed focus on these issues before the December Hong Kong ministerial meeting.
As my Prime Minister has said, if we end up with a failure in December, that will echo right round the world. To make progress on development we need peace and security. As Kofi Annan set out in his document
: 'We will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.'
The summit agreed to establish a new peace-building commission, which will bring together United Nations member states, UN agencies and the international financial institutions to close a critical gap in the UN's ability to help countries emerging from conflict to make that vital transition to long-term stability and avoid relapsing into war. You know, as Members of this Parliament, that the European Union is committed to meeting the summit deadline of establishing the commission by the end of this year.
More could have been said in the summit document regarding terrorism. The strong condemnation of terrorism 'in all its forms and manifestations' was certainly a welcome political statement. But we must now work on fulfilling our pledge to conclude the comprehensive convention on terrorism by September 2006. That will mean agreeing on a legal definition of terrorist acts, something that all of our governments have a real interest in securing. Despite the summit's failure to reach agreement on measures for non-proliferation and disarmament, I can assure Parliament that we will continue to work to move forward the agenda on these important issues.
Ensuring respect for human rights lies at the very heart of the United Nations mission. We are fully supportive, therefore, of the creation of a new human rights council to replace the maligned Commission on Human Rights. We must urgently agree on its size, its mandate and composition so that it can begin its work and ensure that human rights are once again at the core of all UN activity.
Perhaps the decision of greatest significance to emerge from that summit was the agreement on 'the responsibility to protect' – a political commitment that the international community has a duty to act when states cannot or will not protect their populations from the worst atrocities: genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is an important recognition that in today's world we cannot fail to act when vulnerable populations face these terrible atrocities.
We must also work to strengthen the United Nations Secretariat, to make it a more effective and efficient body. We should begin by encouraging Kofi Annan to use the executive powers he already holds to effect change from within the organisation. But we, as member states, also have a key responsibility to ensure that the United Nations is structured and equipped to meet today's and tomorrow's challenges. The European Council welcomed the commitments to reform the main UN bodies, including the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and the Security Council. If the UN is to be effective it has to work collectively with all of its members. That means winning their support. UN organisations must therefore be representative, open and efficient.
We will continue to work on improving the effectiveness of the General Assembly and Ecosoc in particular. We particularly welcome the mandate given to the Secretary-General to consider longer-term reform of the UN's development, humanitarian assistance and environment organisations so that their work is better managed and better coordinated.
The decisions they took after two years of debate and consultation, now enshrined in the so-called outcome document, set the United Nations agenda for the years ahead. The challenges to the world's security and prosperity have been starkly and comprehensively set out by the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of the United Nations Millennium Project, and by Kofi Annan himself in his
report. All concluded that until we took urgent action to address poverty, disease, environmental degradation and social injustice, we would not be able to prevent or resolve conflict. We would not be able to build peace, and without peace and security, development cannot take hold. Neither is possible without respect for human rights.
To be effective the United Nations must have the resources that it needs, but it cannot afford to waste funds on inefficiency and duplication of effort. The European Union fully supports the long-standing principle of budgetary discipline. We are therefore seeking to adopt a budget for the next financial year that will enable the Secretary-General and the United Nations to deliver what its members ask and expect, including under the new mandates agreed at the summit in New York.
The key to the success of that 2005 Millennium Review Summit and the UN's reform programme in general is, of course, implementation. Some of the proposals will be explored in the Committee of the General Assembly, in session from now until the end of this year. Others will be taken forward independently. The European Union will again be at the forefront of this process. We, as United Nations member states, are responsible now for turning words into action.
These, as all the Members of this Parliament will know, are not new concepts. Indeed the United Nations was created 60 years ago to build peace and security throughout the world. But the world is very different 60 years on. Through technology and communication, countries are more closely bound together than ever before. That means too that the impact of conflicts and disasters is increasingly global in its reach. We all, therefore, have an overriding interest in working together to secure peace and build prosperity.
Some, I know, were disappointed and frustrated by the results of the World Summit. Many felt that the commitments made did not go far enough. Reaching a consensus amongst 191 nations was never going to be easy. We know that only too well from our own experience with 25.
So we should take heart from the fact that the far-reaching commitments made by G8 leaders in July to increase aid, to reduce debt and to expand trade have essentially been safeguarded at the United Nations summit. As Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General said, and I quote directly, 'taken as a whole, the [UN summit] document is still a remarkable expression of world unity on a wide range of issues'.
Our task now is to ensure that the agreements are implemented. As my Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said in New York, if we start implementing with urgency the agreements on doubling aid, on opening up trade and establishing fair-trade rules, on debt relief, on HIV/Aids and malaria and on conflict prevention and stopping genocide, we would have more democracy, less oppression, more freedom, less terrorism, more growth, less poverty.
I am proud that the European Union was at the forefront of efforts to reach consensus on all of the issues under debate. We had many priorities for the summit across the four so-called clusters of development, peace and collective security, human rights and the rule of law, and strengthening the United Nations.
I believe that the conclusions reached at the summit set us out on the right path towards improvements in all of these areas, as long as the momentum is sustained and as long as we act now. The interest and commitment shown by Members of this Parliament towards improvements in these areas is truly admirable and was demonstrated in the expertise of the European Parliament delegation who attended the summit, led by co-Chairmen Nirj Deva and Michel Rocard.
The summit secured firm and unambiguous commitments from both donor and developing countries on what is needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals. It strengthened the partnership between developed and developing countries set out at Monterey and consolidated all the achievements of this year so far. It broadened the consensus around the commitments established back in July at the Gleneagles summit to 191 countries, in particular the need to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Goals in Africa and to make international progress once again on climate change. It also agreed, as set out clearly in the outcome document, that development must be sustainable and take account of its impact on the global environment."@en1
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"In Larger Freedom"1
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