Australia, 2005

Australia is a founding

Member of the United Nations, and we have long

supported this Organization’s important role in world

affairs. The United Nations has many achievements to

celebrate in its sixtieth year. Equally, the sixtieth

anniversary places the shortcomings and indeed the

failings of the United Nations under a microscope for

all to see.

In approaching this occasion, the United Nations

and its Members have been presented with a challenge:

to find practical and workable ways to bring greater

security and prosperity to the people of the world

through a reformed United Nations system. This has

not been easy. The reform agenda is simultaneously

vast and urgent, with agreement on approaches

difficult — at times impossible — to achieve, as the

recent summit process made clear.

Australia welcomes the summit’s progress in

some important areas, particularly the agreement to

establish a Peacebuilding Commission to assist fragile

States, a field of endeavour where Australia has long

been active in its own region, as I have outlined in

previous addresses to the General Assembly. We also

welcome the fact that States have agreed for the first

time that the international community, through the

United Nations, has the responsibility to act to protect

populations from gross and systematic violations of

human rights.

We also welcome the call for early conclusion of

a comprehensive terrorism convention and early entry

into force of the International Convention for the

Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism.

We are pleased that, on development, the Summit

Outcome (resolution 60/1) recognizes what already

underpins Australia’s approach to development

assistance: that good governance, sound economic

policies, anti-corruption measures and trade

liberalization are critical elements in fighting poverty

and promoting economies and stable communities.

Australia has a proud record of assistance in these

areas, further underscored by our announcement last

week of an increase in Australia’s overseas aid

allocation to about 4 billion Australian dollars by

2010 — a doubling of aid from 2004 levels — as well

as generous contributions of 10 million Australian

dollars to the Democracy Fund and 3 million to the

Peacebuilding Fund over three years.

As a nation that strongly supports an ambitious

outcome of the Doha round of multilateral trade

negotiations and recognizes the crucial importance of

this to developing countries, Australia also welcomes

the pledge and challenge put forward by President

Bush a week ago (see A/60/PV.2): that the United

States is ready to eliminate all tariffs, subsidies and

other barriers if other nations do the same.

But alongside these welcome outcomes, many

questions and, in some cases, vast disappointments

remain. On arms control and non-proliferation, we

have absolutely nothing to show — an extraordinarily

poor outcome given a contemporary global security

environment in which proliferation threats are so

clearly evident.

The outdated ideology that too many delegations

brought to negotiations was a damningly deep

reflection on the intergovernmental process at the

United Nations. We did not grasp the opportunity

provided by the largest-ever gathering of world leaders

to produce a political declaration defining acts of

terrorism.

How can some nations continue to assert that the

deliberate maiming and targeting of civilians is

sometimes justified?

How is it — after atrocities in Sharm el-Sheikh,

Istanbul, Jakarta, Riyadh and on a daily basis in Iraq —

that some continue to employ double standards,

deceiving themselves into believing that such terrorists

could ever be considered to be “freedom fighters”?

This is not an argument about the merits of a

particular cause. It is about the moral imperative to

outlaw behaviour that offends civilization.

We were disappointed that the summit missed the

opportunity to make progress on Security Council

reform to ensure that the Council’s membership and

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functioning match the priorities and the realities of this

century.

While the summit resolved to create a Human

Rights Council, the outcome document is

disappointingly short on detail. A new Human Rights

Council must overcome the credibility deficit that

plagues current human rights machinery and that sees

some of the most egregious human rights abusers

elevated to positions of leadership.

Australia will participate constructively in

negotiations on the shape of this new Council. We will

also more than double — to $650,000 — our

contribution to the Office of the High Commissioner

for Human Rights.

Finally, the management reforms agreed at the

summit are a step in the right direction, but they are

just that — one step.

The Secretary-General needs more authority and

flexibility to manage the United Nations. And — as

recent inquiries have highlighted in sobering detail —

the United Nations accountability, audit and oversight

systems must be massively strengthened. It will not be

easy, but we must address anew our failures.

The summit heralded an historic shift in our

thinking on humanitarian intervention, showing a

willingness to embrace a new mindset, one which

addresses our responsibility to watch out for each other

in times of need — our collective “responsibility to

protect”. Too often the world has stood by watching

humanitarian disasters unfold before international

machinery has creaked into action.

In Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo, action

taken was too little, too late. Today, the situation in

Darfur epitomizes those shortcomings.

As the Summit Outcome makes clear, all States

have a responsibility to protect their own population

from egregious crimes such as genocide and crimes

against humanity. Where a population is suffering

serious harm, and the relevant State is unwilling or

unable to stop this, the principle of non-intervention

should yield to the collective responsibility to protect.

The Security Council must now rely on this new

consensus to respond more effectively to humanitarian

crises.

We have a responsibility to react faster to

situations of compelling human need, and we must do

more to help countries rebuild, recover and reconcile

after conflicts or disasters.

In the last year we have seen the people of

Afghanistan and Iraq exercise restored democratic

rights. The international community must continue

support for their transformations, help them to leave

behind the experience of brutal dictators and narrow

regimes, and ensure that progress and democracy take

root.

Ceding any ground in Iraq or Afghanistan to the

tyranny of terrorism and the violent suffering it brings

would be a backward step in our global campaign, a

campaign we continue to fight but have not yet won, as

the July terrorist attacks in London and the ongoing

terrorist menace in South-East Asia and elsewhere

make clear. There remains an urgent need for nations to

come together to confront terrorists in the battle of

ideas, contest extremist ideologies, and build greater

and more productive dialogue between faiths and

civilizations.

Australia is doing its utmost in our region to

tackle terrorism and the ideology that feeds it. United

Nations machinery must also play a part. Many

Member States still need assistance to implement

United Nations counter-terrorism standards and build

their counter-terrorism capabilities — the kind of

outcomes Australia is already pursuing in cooperation

with its regional partners. Leaders made some progress

in this direction last week but did not adopt the

Secretary-General’s counter-terrorism strategy.

Australia welcomed the General Assembly’s

adoption of the International Convention for the

Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism in April this

year. Our Prime Minister, John Howard, signed that

Convention for Australia at the summit. It is now

imperative that we redouble our efforts to conclude a

comprehensive convention against terrorism during

this session of the General Assembly. Closing the gaps

in the counter-terrorism legal framework is an essential

complement to our concerted efforts to prevent future

attacks and to prosecute those who commit terrorist

acts. Effective international efforts to criminalize such

acts are a vital step forward.

The world today is confronted by a menace not

envisaged at the time the Geneva Conventions were

drafted — terrorist organizations and their foot

soldiers, like those captured in Afghanistan, who bear

arms on a battlefield but pay no heed to the laws of

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war, fight for no regular army, wear no uniform and

bear no recognizable insignia. Just as international law

evolved to deal with a scourge of another age —

piracy — so today a comprehensive convention against

terrorism is needed to help deal with these perpetrators

of terrorist acts.

The summit was a lost opportunity on

disarmament and non-proliferation. Multilateral non-

proliferation regimes are being tested now by a small

minority of Governments that flout the norms and

standards observed by the rest of the international

community and which in doing so imperil the security

of us all.

A dangerous new dimension to this global

challenge is the known ambition of terrorists to acquire

weapons of mass destruction. It is therefore imperative

that we take practical action against proliferation as it

occurs, through innovative measures such as the

Proliferation Security Initiative that complement and

reinforce multilateral regimes.

Earlier this year I saw firsthand the Review

Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the

Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons be thwarted by

a few countries determined to prevent consensus.

Australia — together with the overwhelming

majority of States — remains unwavering in its support

for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and we will continue

to take a leading role in universalizing the Additional

Protocol on strengthening nuclear safeguards, making

it a precondition for the supply of uranium to non-

nuclear-weapon States.

It is not acceptable, in the current global climate,

that we have not started negotiations on a fissile

material cut-off treaty, a treaty which would reduce the

risk of leakage of fissile material to proliferators or

terrorists and would buttress nuclear disarmament

gains made to date.

I am pleased to be chairing the Comprehensive

Test-Ban Treaty Article XIV Conference this

afternoon, looking for ways to accelerate that Treaty’s

entry into force.

A firmer and more active Security Council role

on the issue of weapons of mass destruction is also

sorely needed.

Australia is a committed and long-term supporter

of the United Nations and of the vital role that it can

play in promoting international peace and security. We

have a proud record of contributing to United Nations

activities, funding and debates, extending back to its

formation in 1945.

But we are not an uncritical supporter. The need

to reform the United Nations has been a consistent

theme since I first addressed the General Assembly at

its fifty-first session in 1996. Such a need is all the

more compelling today.

The reality is that there continue to be States

failing or in precipitous decline for no reasons other

than poor leadership and poor governance — with

disastrous results for human lives. What does it say

when the international community proves to be

unwilling to act when misrule has caused life

expectancy to plunge in what was one of Africa’s most

promising countries — from around 63 years in the

early 1990s, to just under 34 years in 2004? Would

today’s United Nations be able to prevent another

Rwanda?

We and the publics of the world expect much of

the United Nations, and rightly so. The stakes are too

high in this complex and challenging security

environment to accept anything less. We all have a part

to play. There was some welcome progress at the

summit; but where we have fallen short we must

acknowledge it and be ambitious in pursuing more

meaningful reform. Large challenges loom before us.

We should approach them with a degree of realism.

Australia does not believe that the United Nations is

the answer to all the problems of the world. But the

Organization does have a role to play. When we call on

the United Nations, it must be able to fulfil that role

effectively and expeditiously. The publics of the world

expect nothing less.