Vanuatu, 1996

First of all, Sir, I offer you my delegation’s

heartiest congratulations on the occasion of your election to

the presidency of the fifty-first session of the General

Assembly. Your rich experience in bilateral and multilateral

diplomacy is, for my delegation, a guarantee for the success

of our work. My country, the Republic of Vanuatu, and

yours, Malaysia, enjoy friendly and cooperative relations.

I also wish to express my country’s thanks to your

predecessor, Mr. Diogo Freitas do Amaral, for the

commitment, competence and skill with which he guided

our work at the fiftieth session of the General Assembly.

I wish to express my country’s appreciation to the

Secretary-General, Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for the

remarkable work that he has consistently done since the

very beginning of his term of office in the service of our

Organization. I reaffirm here my Government’s support for

the principle by which, according to tradition, Africa has a

right to a second mandate.

My Government has made its modest contribution to

disarmament and arms-control measures. This modest

contribution has been made in the areas of conventional

weapons and weapons of mass destruction alike. With

regard to conventional weapons, on 10 July 1996 the

Republic of Vanuatu provided the Secretary-General,

through the Centre for Disarmament Affairs, with

information on imports, exports and the re-exportation of

weapons covered by the Register of Conventional Arms

established by the Secretary-General under General

Assembly resolution 46/36 L of 9 December 1991. The

information I have mentioned is contained in the report of

the Secretary-General in document A/51/300 of 20 August

1996.

I wish to reaffirm the position of the Government of

the Republic of Vanuatu on the complete elimination of

anti-personnel landmines. Indeed, at the fiftieth session of

the General Assembly, the Republic of Vanuatu voted in

favour of resolution 50/70 O entitled “Moratorium on the

export of anti-personnel landmines”. As we all know, the

majority of the victims of anti-personnel landmines are

women and children.

In the area of weapons of mass destruction, my

Government has made its modest contribution through

measures at both the regional and international levels. Let

us take a look first at the regional level.

The Republic of Vanuatu acceded last year to the

Treaty of Rarotonga establishing the South Pacific

Nuclear Free Zone. I take this opportunity, on behalf of

the people and the Government of the Republic of Vanuatu,

to congratulate the United States of America, the French

Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and

Northern Ireland, which signed the Treaty last year. My

Government welcomed the ratification last September by

the French Republic of the Protocols to the Rarotonga

Treaty and pays tribute to its initiative of sending an expert

team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

to conduct a radiological study at the sites of French

nuclear tests in French Polynesia.

In the area of global nuclear disarmament, on 24

September 1996 I signed, on behalf of my Government, the

Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty adopted by the

General Assembly on 10 September 1996. Moreover, my

country acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of

Nuclear Weapons, opened for signature in Moscow, London

and Washington on 1 July 1968, and supports the indefinite

extension of that Treaty.

The Republic of Vanuatu, like other Members of our

Organization, took note of the Advisory Opinion rendered

last summer by the International Court of Justice, the legal

organ of the United Nations, on the legality of the threat or

use of nuclear weapons. This Advisory Opinion is an

additional commitment in favour of nuclear disarmament.

The major objective of measures taken and to be taken by

the Republic of Vanuatu in the coming years is to

demonstrate our commitment to the complete and general

disarmament of our entire planet.

I would like to express my Government’s views on

some regional conflicts, namely, those in the former

Yugoslavia in Central Europe, in the Great Lakes region in

the heart of the African continent, and in the Middle East.

Regarding the situation in the former Yugoslavia in Central

Europe, my Government welcomes the elections held on 14

September as an important step forward for the future of

Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the Great Lakes region of

Africa, my Government supports the efforts of our

Organization, in close cooperation with the Organization of

African Unity, to avert a widespread war in that region.

Finally, with respect to the situation in the Middle East, my

Government congratulates the Palestinian and Israeli

delegations on having decided last Sunday, 6 October 1996,

to resume discussions that should lead to a lasting peace in

that region.

In the area of international law, the United Nations,

through the International Law Commission, must continue

to play a major role in the codification of international law.

In this respect, the Republic of Vanuatu joins with other

Members of the United Nations in calling for the

convening of an international conference of

plenipotentiaries entrusted with considering the draft

statute of an international court prepared by the

International Law Commission and with concluding a

convention establishing an international criminal court.

In the area of human rights, in September 1995 the

National Parliament of the Republic of Vanuatu adopted

a law on the office of mediators. The mediator began his

work in late 1995. I take this opportunity to thank the

Government of Papua New Guinea, in the context of

cooperation between members of the Melanesian

Spearhead Group, for its valuable technical assistance in

helping my Government to implement fully and with

relative celerity the provisions of the aforementioned law.

Above and beyond the role of mediator, there is,

obviously, the fundamental law — the Constitution of the

Republic of Vanuatu — which guarantees the

fundamental rights and individual freedoms of all of its

citizens.

I wish to recall the statement made here by the

Prime Minister of the Republic of Vanuatu at last year’s

commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption

of the Charter of the United Nations, in which he

reaffirmed the Government of the Republic of Vanuatu’s

support for the reform and rational management of the

United Nations system. I also take this opportunity to

express my Government’s opinion that the scale of

assessments for the apportionment of the expenses of our

Organization must faithfully reflect the capacity to pay of

the Member States of our Organization.

In the area of development, my Government will

participate in the special session of the General Assembly

next year devoted to the assessment of Agenda 21 and

hopes, with other delegations that have expressed this idea

here, that new commitments will be undertaken towards

the environment. In this respect, the Environment Unit of

Vanuatu’s national bureau of the environment, created in

1986 under the auspices of the Ministry of Natural

Resources, will work in close collaboration with the

environmental programme of the Oceanian region in

preparing the Pacific region’s contribution to the work of

the special session of the General Assembly.

Last year, through a decision of the Ministry of

Home Affairs and Decentralization to apply the law on

decentralization within the Republic of Vanuatu, my

Government reduced the number of provinces from 11

to 6. The purpose of this reduction was, first, to allow the

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major islands to help the smaller ones; secondly, to allocate

financial and human resources to all of the provinces; and,

finally, to demonstrate the will of my Government to

decentralize administrative and public functions for the

benefit of provinces. In other words, it encourages

communities and individuals to participate in the economic

and social development of the Republic. In this regard, I

take this opportunity to thank the United Nations

Development Programme in its capacity as a multilateral

partner in the regional efforts of all Oceanian States and,

more particularly, for its valuable assistance to the

Government of the Republic of Vanuatu in drafting its book

on sustainable human development in Vanuatu. My

Government presented this book to the press on

23 September.

In conclusion, I wish to reaffirm here the faith of the

Republic of Vanuatu in the United Nations.