Czech Republic, 2007

Allow me to congratulate you,

Sir, on your election as President of the General

Assembly at its sixty-second session. I also welcome

the highly respected Secretary-General to the first

session of the Assembly convened since he assumed

his post.

I would like to start by saying that my country is

proud to be one of the founding fathers of the United

Nations in its current form. The Czech Republic, a

successor State of Czechoslovakia, participated

actively in all kinds of United Nations activities in the

past and it will continue to do so in the future. We take

part in the work not only of the United Nations itself,

but also of its specialized organizations and agencies

such as UNESCO, the United Nations Development

Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization of

the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the

International Atomic Energy Agency and many others.

We have always supported any meaningful initiative

that leads to the increase of stability and prosperity in

the world.

I am proud to confirm that the Czech Republic

has the ambition to be elected to the Security Council

as a non-permanent member for the period 2008-2009.

I believe that we can be trusted by the majority of

Member countries and that we deserve their votes. We

are convinced that we have already demonstrated our

devotion to freedom, democracy, international

cooperation, economic development and respect for the

sovereignty of countries belonging to the community

of nations. My country served in the Security Council

in 1994-1995. We tried to do our best. We were reliable

and committed to hard work. I can assure the Assembly

that we will now do an even a better job.

We have always recognized the principal

responsibility of the Security Council for maintaining

peace and security. Since the 1990s, the Czech

Republic has contributed to more than 20 United

Nations peacekeeping missions and United Nations-

mandated operations in the Balkans, Asia and Africa.

We deeply believe in the prevention and non-violent

resolution of disputes and conflicts. That can be proved

by our own behaviour; witness the peaceful dissolution

of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Over the past several years,

we have also multiplied our official development

assistance.

In the past 18 years, the Czech Republic has

undergone radical and dynamic development, which

was made possible by the fall of communism and by

our rapid departure from that oppressive, inhuman and

inefficient political, social and economic system. Our

transformation strategy, based on the acceptance of

political pluralism, parliamentary democracy and a

market economy, was successful.

A further important impetus to our development

was our approaching the European Union and our entry

into it three years ago. Today, the Czech Republic is a

full-fledged member of the Union and will hold the

European Union presidency in the first half of 2009. It

might be of interest to the Assembly that the slogan of

the Czech presidency will be Europe without

barriers. We mean by that the removing of both

internal and external European Union barriers. I fully

support that concept, as I strongly believe in the need

to remove barriers that hinder economic progress,

especially in developing countries.

We consider the United Nations to be an

extremely important and, in fact, irreplaceable

platform. There is no substitute for it in the current

world. It is a platform for meetings and consultations,

for dialogue and, eventually, for reaching agreements

on treaties among nations sharing the same or similar

values and political stances. This unique platform is

based on the plurality of views of its 192 Member

countries and on our mutual respect for our sometimes

differing positions. The ambition of the United Nations

is not, and should never be, the search for one

obligatory, unitary view imposed by some of us on

those who disagree.

I did not use the term “platform” by chance and

without purpose. By using it, I implicitly object to the

alternative concept: the concept of global governance

based on the indefensible idea that the world can be

globally governed, masterminded, controlled, managed

and/or even planned. To aspire to do that is something

we can never accept. It is an ambition based on the

abuse of reason and on the pretence of knowledge.

Democracy is something else.

There are some among us who prefer the

operational efficiency - or the ability to act - of this

Organization to the recognition of the existence of

different views. They want to make decisions in an

easier and faster way. Our communist past tells us that

we should not do that. We also want the United Nations

to be reasonably operational, but we categorically

oppose that happening at the expense of individual

Member States. We have to respect the views of

individual member countries regardless of their size. It

is crucial that every Member State has equal status and

that its voice not be ignored.

We have to go forward. The United Nations needs

changes. We do support reform of the United Nations,

because the Organization should reflect the current

situation in the world more than the situation of the era

when it was founded. Some changes are inevitable, and

we should discuss them seriously.

To our great regret, in the world at present we are

witnessing many cases where there is a lack of freedom

and democracy. Our task for the future is to minimize

such cases. However, I do not see and hear the terms

"freedom" and "democracy" as much or as often as

they deserve. We hear other words more frequently:

aid, government initiatives and interventions, social

justice, positive rights, environment, resources,

climate, problem solving, facing threats and global

challenges among others.

Here we have to be very careful. We should

support meaningful activities, not programmes that in

effect put constraints on local development. We should

use natural resources efficiently and protect the

environment, but not in a way that restricts human

activity and harms economic development. We would

help global development more by reducing barriers

than by providing conditional aid. Reducing

protectionism and lowering export subsidies is a far

more efficient way to help developing countries than

anything else. We should not allow developing

countries to be blocked from their own economic

growth by additional burdens imposed upon them that

they will not be able to bear.

At the conference on climate change held the day

before yesterday, I resolutely warned against the

unjustified alarmism of global-warming activists and

their fellow-travellers in some Governments and

international organizations, but even that potential

problem, as well as any other, can never be solved

without relying on freedom, free markets, free trade

and other attributes of free society.

Preserving the environment is very important, but

we have to be modest in our attempts to control the

complexities of the world. Let us use the potential of

this Organization as much as possible. Let us

cooperate, let us listen to each other, let us negotiate to

the last possible moment and let us try to understand

others. The Czech Republic tries to follow those rules.