United Kingdom, 1997

We inhabit a modern

world in which we must accept change as the normal

condition of life. Communication around the globe is

becoming faster. The distance between our countries is

becoming shorter. I travelled to New York at twice the

speed of sound and I landed before I took off. Every word

I say to the Assembly today will be sent to London down

a telephone line and within minutes it will appear on the

World Wide Web.

Our countries today are intertwined as never before in

a market place that is global. And our people have learned

that their purchasing decisions have an impact on jobs and

pay across the planet — from the fruit they buy at the

supermarket to the fuel they use in their cars. Changes to

the environment in one continent can produce changes to

the weather in another continent. Our countries are

increasingly interdependent, and the challenges we each

face are global challenges — challenges that we must face

together: poverty, conflict, climate change, international

crime and the drugs menace. These are all international

problems that require us to behave as a united nations not

just in name but in reality.

And so the United Nations should have a bigger role

than ever before. If it appears to be less relevant, it is not

for want of challenge but for want of reform. The United

Nations must modernize. It must be able to confront the

new global challenges that all its Members face. It will

need flexibility, competence and efficiency to meet the

complex needs of the twenty-first century because the

United Nations cannot give leadership to a changing

world if we ourselves refuse to change.

The outstanding leadership shown by the Secretary-

General is an important start. His proposals for

institutional reform will retain what is best in the United

Nations system but give it the flexibility and the

efficiency it needs to respond rapidly to the new

challenges of a new century. The member countries of the

United Nations must support his commitment to

modernization. We must each stop measuring each

proposal for reform in terms of narrow self-interest and,

instead, recognize that we all have a greater interest in

supporting reform.

Britain’s Labour Government is firmly committed to

the United Nations. We demonstrated this commitment as

soon as we were elected by rejoining the United Nations

Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

(UNESCO) and by confirming our intention to stay in the

United Nations Industrial Development Organization

(UNIDO). We were elected because we offered Britain

modernization to succeed in a new century. We pledge

ourselves to back modernization of the United Nations.

We do so because we know that our country, like all

other Member States, will benefit from a United Nations

that is efficient, representative and properly funded.

Let me take each of those in turn. Efficient does not

spell cheap. But we do want to see the United Nations do

the most it can with what it has got — a United Nations

that no longer spends $150 million producing 2,500 tons

of documents every year. We thoroughly welcome the

Secretary-General’s commitment to reduce the number of

documents by 25 per cent by next year. We want to see

an end to the duplication between United Nations

agencies, and I give my wholehearted support to the

Secretary-General’s proposal for a Special Commission to

look at the division of labour right across the United

Nations system.

15

Another way in which the United Nations is out of

date is its Security Council. We are all agreed in this

Chamber that what was appropriate in 1945 is not what is

right in 1997. The world has changed. Most of the

countries represented here today did not even exist when

the United Nations was formed. The Security Council must

move on if it is not to lose its legitimacy. Japan and

Germany should both be included in an expanded

permanent membership, and there should be a new balance

between developed and developing countries in a

modernized Security Council. We are all agreed on the

need for change; we have been discussing it for four years.

It is time that we agreed that a proposal for change which

has the backing of the vast majority of Members is better

than a status quo which has the backing of none.

It is not just all the countries of the United Nations

that must be properly represented, but all the people of

those countries. More than half those people are women.

Britain welcomes the United Nations willingness to put

gender perspective into all areas of its work. The new

Labour Government attaches particular importance to

strengthening the rights of women. Women do more than

half the world’s work. They should have equal status in the

international organizations of the world.

Let us also put the United Nations finances on a sound

basis. Speaker after speaker yesterday referred to the need

for us to cooperate to defeat those who make fortunes from

organized crime and to contain the drugs trade, second only

in value to the oil trade. We cannot defeat those well-

resourced menaces to the modern world through a United

Nations that staggers from year to year on the verge of

bankruptcy.

We need a solution based on the ability to pay. The

most equitable means of sharing the burden is to base

contributions on share of global gross national product. But

that measure will only be accepted as equitable if it is

updated regularly to reflect the rapid changes to the world

economy. And it is not equitable that some Members pay

their contributions while other Members do not. Britain

pays in full and on time. Britain expects every Member

State, however large or however small, to do the same.

These three issues — institutional reform, Security

Council reform and financial reform — are critical to the

United Nations future. Let us commit ourselves to progress

on all these issues by the end of 1997 and solutions by this

time next year. Next time we meet, let us celebrate a

modern United Nations that can face the future with

confidence, rather than looking back on another year of

agreeing about all the questions but not being able to

agree on any of the answers. And then the United Nations

will be able to get on with its job.

There are three key areas in which the United

Nations has a vital job to do — promoting sustainable

development, promoting peace and promoting human

rights. Those are not separate challenges, but different

faces of the same challenge. There can be no real and

sustainable development or respect for human rights

without peace. And there will be no permanent peace

where there is only poverty and injustice.

During every speech this week another 300 children

will die before their first birthday, most of them deaths

that could be easily and cheaply prevented. If the United

Nations is to be relevant to its Members, then more than

anything else it must enable people to lift themselves out

of poverty.

Britain supports the United Nations aid target. As

Britain’s contribution to achieving it, the mew Labour

Governments has committed itself to reversing the decline

in the British aid budget. Britain has also consistently

urged faster action in tackling the problem of debt, and at

the Commonwealth Finance Ministers meeting in

Mauritius last week, British Chancellor Gordon Brown

launched a new initiative to cut debt that will benefit 300

million of the world’s poorest people and help developing

countries escape from the debt trap.

But aid will not alone eliminate poverty. We need to

continue breaking down the barriers that deny the poorest

countries access to the world’s most lucrative markets.

We need to make sure that producers in Africa are

allowed to sell their goods to Europe and to America as

easily as their producers can sell their goods to Africa.

Sustainable development will do more than just

reduce poverty. Poverty is also one of the greatest threats

to the environment. If we want to preserve the planet for

future generations, we must make sure that development

respects the environment and does not destroy it. The

United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development

has made important progress towards this goal. But it is

not a task any country can subcontract to the United

Nations. We are all in this together. No country can opt

out of global warming or fence in its own private climate.

We need common action to save our common

environment.

16

The new Labour Government has set itself the

ambitious target of reducing Britain’s emissions of

greenhouse gases by 20 per cent by the year 2010. At the

third session of the Conference of the Parties to the United

Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in

Kyoto, the nations of the world must sign up to binding

targets and then they must keep to them.

The second key goal is peace — preventing conflicts

before they happen, helping to end them when they do

happen and helping to rebuild lasting peace after conflict.

Each of these contributions to peace is equally vital.

But it is the United Nations peacekeeping operations

that have the highest profile, and with good reason. The

blue berets have prevented worse conflict across the world,

from Eastern Slavonia to the Western Sahara. Many have

laid down their lives, not in the conduct of war but in the

pursuit of peace. The death of a dozen international

policemen and envoys, among them a British diplomat, in

the United Nations helicopter that crashed in Bosnia last

week, was a grim reminder of the risks we ask our peace-

builders to take. I pay tribute to their courage and salute

them for their professionalism and their skill.

The last area in which the United Nations must focus

is human rights. As the world becomes smaller, and news

and ideas travel faster, so the principle that certain rights

are universal becomes even more compelling. The

Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets out the right to

freedom from the fear of violence and the right to liberty

from the threat of unjust imprisonment. Those are rights to

which every citizen of the world irrespective of race, creed

or colour. They must not be limited to any one culture or

any one continent. As the Secretary-General has pointed out

Secretary-General has pointed out, the mothers from every

culture weep when their sons and daughters are killed or

maimed by repressive rule.

Nor do human rights hinder economic development.

The past two decades have demonstrated that political

freedom and economic development are not in conflict but

are mutually reinforcing. Free societies are efficient

economies. Authoritarian rule more often produces

economic stagnation. That is why Britain supports the

Secretary-General’s proposals to integrate human rights into

all the work that the United Nations does.

This is my first General Assembly. I attend it with

both hope and with anxiety — hope that, if it modernizes,

the United Nations can help us face the global challenges

of the future; anxiety that, without modernizing, the

United Nations will lose legitimacy and its effectiveness.

We must not let that happen. There are too many

children stunted by poverty, too many mothers fearful of

war, too many people whose basic human rights are being

abuse. The United Nations offers them hope. Let us

commit ourselves this week to achieving a modern,

reformed United Nations that will turn hope into reality.