Monaco, 1997

It is a great pleasure for me to congratulate you, Sir, on

your outstanding election. Your competence and your vast

experience in multilateral diplomacy, to which you have

devoted a large part of your professional life, together with

your personal qualities assure us that our work will be

conducted properly and be successful.

I should also like to take this opportunity to pay a

well-earned tribute to Ambassador Razali of Malaysia for

the effective way in which he conducted the fifty-first

session of our General Assembly.

I congratulate, also, the members of the Bureau, who

I am convinced stand ready to do their utmost to ensure

the success of this important session.

It is in fact an important session because, upon the

invitation of the Secretary-General, it is being devoted

largely to an exchange of views, which I hope will be

productive, on the reform of the Organization.

The document before us, entitled “Renewing the

United Nations: A Programme for Reform”, is of the

greatest interest to my country's authorities. The desire to

make the Organization, and above all its Secretariat, more

efficient by improving the coherence and coordination of

its activities is the very judicious inspiration for the

proposed reform process. That desire is easy to

understand and endorse, given its obvious responsiveness

to current real needs.

During the 52 years of its existence, the United

Nations has regularly been challenged by the requirements

of an ever changing world and has thus been led to

develop or create new structures — without, however,

always reducing or suppressing old ones.

The current exceptionally broad changes in the

political, economic and social spheres irresistibly call for

a profound transformation of multilateral cooperation.

They require the Organization to make an ineluctable

effort to adapt that cannot be delayed without jeopardizing

its prestige and seeing its international role inexorably

wither. Thus, we can only endorse the will demonstrated by

the General Assembly at the fiftieth anniversary of the

United Nations and the recent initiatives undertaken. In our

view, it is rational to concentrate and better coordinate the

Organization's missions around the five great pillars of its

Charter responsibilities: international peace and security,

development, humanitarian affairs, economic and social

affairs and human rights.

The promotion and protection of human rights, which

the Secretary-General very rightly proposes to strengthen,

receive the intersectoral treatment which their

multidisciplinary nature naturally evokes. That nature must

not allow us to forget, however, that this fundamental area

of the Organization's competence requires the strengthening

of its appropriate structures. The High Commissioner for

Human Rights, Mrs. Mary Robinson, who has just assumed

her office — and whose arrival we welcome sincerely and

confidently — must be given sufficient human and financial

resources, as well as the decision-making autonomy,

necessary to fulfil the essential duties that have fallen to

her.

Next year's celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of

the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be an

opportunity to recall the commitments undertaken by the

Member States when they adopted that text on 10

December, 1948, and, a few years later, on 16 December

1966, the two international human rights agreements which,

I am pleased to say, the Principality has recently ratified.

The Emergency Relief Coordinator entrusted with

humanitarian assistance must also enjoy the greatest

autonomy and the means necessary to allow him to

intervene effectively and promptly when necessary — a

task that the Government of the Principality accords the

highest priority.

This autonomy must, more generally, touch the entire

international civil services. The independence of United

Nations agents — the Secretary-General first among

them — is the guarantee of the quality of their service and

of the trust which the international community places in

them.

The decision to bring together all the field

programmes and information centres in common premises,

to be known as United Nations Houses, is both rational and

symbolic. It is an ideal response to the current needs to

concentrate and better coordinate operational activities,

while promoting a strong and cohesive image of the entire

system. We strongly encourage the Secretary-General to

pursue this approach, which has recently been undertaken

in South Africa.

For those States that will not have the opportunity to

host such Houses, might we not consider establishing a

United Nations presence in the form of a volunteer

honourary representative: a national figure mandated,

alongside the authorities, to disseminate information and

heighten general awareness? The widespread practice of

appointing honourary consuls could, in this respect, serve

as an example.

The special team dedicated to reorienting

information activities highlights, in the Secretary-

General's report, a need which we understand: to improve

and enlarge the United Nations capacity to communicate

at the country level through innovative local partnerships.

The establishment of honourary United Nations

representatives would be one way to follow up that

suggestion on a practical and affordable level.

As the Secretary-General points out, public interest

in the United Nations could also be sharpened by the

organization of high-level thematic debates within General

Assembly bodies. We agree with this, given that such

debates would receive more attention from the press and

public opinion than those currently held and would lessen

the need for large world conferences.

The Security Council has already taken steps to

improve information services and exchanges with Member

States that are not members of the Council and with the

international community at large. These steps are useful

and welcome and are beginning to bear fruit.

The important question of enlarging the membership

of that principal organ, which depends on a decision from

the Member States, is also of great interest to us. The

High-level Working Group on that subject has worked

tremendously hard under the leadership of successive

Presidents of the General Assembly and the dedication of

its Vice-Presidents. We convey to them our warmest

thanks. The Principality of Monaco is ready to endorse

unreservedly any commitment or solution that might be

achieved, including the creation of long-term seats lasting

six to 10 years, for example.

In tandem with the improvement already begun in

the functioning of the Economic and Social Council, some

considered attention also appears to be necessary to the

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Trusteeship Council. The suggestions made by the

Secretary-General seem to us to be wise and far-sighted.

The Principality of Monaco could support the idea of

entrusting that organ with new trusteeship responsibilities

in the spheres of the environment and the protection of the

common human patrimony. Outer space, the atmosphere,

the high seas, as well as the free zones of the Arctic and

Antarctic — especially in the spirit of the 1959 Treaty —

would all stand to gain, under certain conditions, by being

placed within its competence. The Council might also be

entrusted with the ongoing task of considering the great

transformations that would be entailed by predictable

advances in science and technology.

We must hope that the proposed reforms will be

speedily enacted, so that the Millennium Assembly

proposed by the Secretary-General for the year 2000 will

indeed be an occasion for celebrating an updated and

modernized United Nations.

The Principality, which this year is celebrating the

700th anniversary of my family's dynasty in Monaco, can

only wish long life to a United Nations strengthened and

more open to civil society.

Turning now to the nearer future, allow me to

emphasize the importance that my country attaches to

concluding the work on the international criminal court,

which should lead to a plenipotentiary diplomatic

conference next year in Rome. A collective morality that is

universal in scope cannot exist without institutions to

disseminate it, implement it and ensure its respect.

The adoption of a Convention on anti-personnel

landmines, which continue to inflict their savagery on

civilian populations, has long been one of our goals. Is not

respect for the dignity and physical integrity of human

beings one of the most essential and universally recognized

values, one that underlies both human rights and

humanitarian law?

The meeting convened by Canada last October and the

series of meetings held in Vienna, Bonn and Brussels this

year, as well as the diplomatic conference that recently took

place in Oslo have led to the drafting of a text, which, in

the spirit of resolution 51/45 S, prohibits not only the use

but also the development, stockpiling and transfer of such

mines. We truly welcome this development.

In the same vein, I should like to note that the

Principality has recently submitted its instruments of

accession to the Convention on Prohibitions or

Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons

Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to

Have Indiscriminate Effects, a Convention that we believe

constitutes great progress in the rules of warfare.

Next year will be the International Year of the

Ocean, for which we are making active preparations. The

marine environment laboratory of the International

Atomic Energy Agency in Monaco has recently moved

into new, spacious and functional offices made available

to it by our Government. That laboratory, thanks to its

modern equipment, is helping to identify sources and new

chemical markers of marine pollution. It regularly

organizes training courses and consultative missions, and

it is actively contributing, with the assistance of the

United Nations Environment Programme and the

Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, to the

MEDPOL programme to combat pollution in the

Mediterranean — an issue of great interest to us.

The International Year of the Ocean should provide

an opportunity to strengthen such programmes as well as

international cooperation to promote the preservation and

management of marine resources, including certain fish

stocks and marine mammals. At the nineteenth special

session of the General Assembly on the environment last

June, many delegations emphasized these issues. Echoing

the Commission on Sustainable Development, some quite

rightly recalled the need regularly to assess, on an

intergovernmental level and in the framework of the

United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the

quality of the marine environment. This has been done for

almost 20 years in France, Italy and Monaco under the

RAMOGE programme. We hope that other regional

cooperation activities of this nature will develop in 1998.

For coastal States as well as for the international

community, the oceans and the seas must be a protected,

shared space, sparingly exploited — not a place for

intense economic confrontation.

Finally, like the European Union, whose views on

many issues we share, the Principality of Monaco remains

very concerned by the continued financial crisis in the

United Nations. This crisis can be resolved only if

Member States comply strictly with their commitments

and pay in full, on time and without conditions their

contributions to the regular and peacekeeping budgets as

well as all accumulated arrears.

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As a member of the International Olympic Committee,

I am pleased once again to remind the Assembly that the

Winter Olympic Games will be held next February in

Nagano, Japan. The General Assembly at its fifty-first

session invited Member States, through resolution 50/13, to

respect a truce before, during and after both the Summer

and Winter Olympic Games. Building a peaceful and better

world through sport and the Olympic ideal must remain our

motto at that great international meeting of the youth of the

world.

Finally, I should like to convey my deep sorrow,

shared by my father and by the people of Monaco, at the

loss of lives resulting from the forest fires — an ecological

cataclysm — that are raging in Sumatra, Indonesia, and

from the air disaster that occurred in Maden this morning,

as well as at the tragic results of last night's earthquake in

the Italian peninsula. I should like to extend, on my own

behalf and on behalf of my father and the people of

Monaco, our deepest condolences and sympathy.