Maldives, 2010

I would first like to

congratulate you, Mr. President, on your election to

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preside over the sixty-fifth session of the General

Assembly. Please be assured of my delegation’s full

support and cooperation. I would also like to take this

opportunity to offer our appreciation to both your

predecessor, Mr. Ali Abdussalam Treki, for the

exemplary manner in which he guided the work of the

sixty-fourth session, and to Secretary-General Ban

Ki-moon for his leadership of the United Nations over

the past four years.

Last week, I had the opportunity to report on the

Maldives’ progress towards attainment of the

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). My report

demonstrated that while we have achieved five of the

eight MDGs — namely, Goals 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 —

several others remain challenges, and some

achievements are increasingly becoming threatened.

For example, the Maldives has made great strides in

eliminating poverty, in education and in improving

mortality rates among mothers and infants. However,

we have yet to make significant gains in the area of the

empowerment of women. We are also still struggling to

provide for our environmental and development needs.

Moreover, religious extremism runs counter to notions

of equality and social justice and endangers our

achievements in gender parity. All the while,

environmental and economic vulnerabilities threaten to

diminish our gains.

Those gains, among others, have improved the

lives of the Maldivian people and contributed to a

situation that has led to our imminent graduation from

the United Nations list of least developed countries

(LDCs) this year. While we look forward to our

graduation, we are also concerned about the sudden

withdrawal of some of the benefits afforded to LDCs

that have helped sustain our development efforts for

the past four decades. Those include preferential

market access and concessionary financing. While we

were very encouraged by the pledges made by our

partners at the donors conference held in the Maldives

in March this year to invest in urgent development

projects, we anxiously await the speedy disbursement

of the promised aid.

Furthermore, we look forward to working with

our development partners to achieve consensus on a

transitional model that provides for a gradual reduction

of benefits to avoid the disruption of our development

efforts, as stipulated in resolution 59/209. As a country

on the verge of LDC graduation, we look forward to

adopting a development strategy that places emphasis

on greater independence and economic stability

through private investment and public-private

partnerships. Our Government’s policies on

privatization and our employment of commercial

diplomacy are designed to achieve this transition.

However, like many other small island States, our

geopolitical and socio-economic circumstances will

continue to render the Maldives vulnerable.

The impact of the recent global recession clearly

demonstrates those vulnerabilities. As a country

primarily dependent on tourism and fishing, the

Maldives was severely affected by decreases in

consumption in our traditional markets. As a result, the

Government was compelled to implement severe

austerity measures that cut public spending and

undertook massive economic reforms. Nevertheless,

our people continue to face formidable development

challenges, and thus the Maldives will continue to push

for greater recognition within the United Nations for

the plight of small island developing States.

The economic transition in the Maldives

complements an ambitious political transition from

autocracy to democracy. Although this is a daunting

task, we have been successful in achieving important

milestones over the course of these past two years. In

fact, the two-year period of transition stipulated in our

new Constitution concluded in August. This process

resulted in the establishment of our Supreme Court and

the creation of other relevant institutions. While our

transition process was accompanied by some political

discord, it was largely peaceful.

Our friends in the international community

helped us find peaceful solutions during this somewhat

tumultuous period in our politics. I would like to thank

all members of the international community for their

continued engagement and assistance, and especially

President Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka for his

constructive contributions.

The Maldives’ transition to democracy has been

accompanied by our evolution from an abuser of

human rights to a staunch advocate for them. We are

proud of what we have achieved, but are the first to

recognize that there is no shortage of challenges that

require our immediate attention. These include the

need to abrogate the use of torture, the need to

safeguard the rights of women, children and the

disabled, and the need to improve our capacity to deal

with human trafficking in our region.

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The Maldives is proud to have been elected to the

Human Rights Council in May, and we are cognizant of

the trust and responsibility conferred upon us by the

overwhelming support demonstrated by United Nations

Members across all regions. We will continue to

uphold our pledge to use our membership to promote

human rights through positive engagement and to

address sensitivities in our collective quest to protect

the most vulnerable. Moreover, the Maldives is

undergoing its own universal periodic review this year,

and we consider this exercise to be an opportunity to

further strengthen human rights protections at home.

While our interest in human rights is rooted in

our ambition to improve the lives of our own citizens,

it also emerges from our rising concerns about life in

our now interconnected global village, where the need

to compel tolerance, understanding and respect for

human dignity is greater than ever before. We support

the initiatives for a culture of peace, dialogue among

civilizations and tolerance among different faiths.

As a Muslim country, we lament the rising tide of

Islamophobia in non-Muslim States. The people of the

Maldives certainly appreciate the difference between

Government-sanctioned incidents and those anti-Muslim

activities that can be attributed to marginal segments of

non-Muslim societies. However, we believe that

religious intolerance, negative stereotyping, racial

profiling and discrimination thwart this institution’s

mission for peace and prosperity among all societies.

Therefore, we must intensify our efforts to promote a

culture of tolerance and understanding while pursuing an

effective dialogue to expand the scope of rational

discourse between the Islamic world and other

civilizations.

Some of the gravest threats facing humankind

today do not occupy their rightful places in the

headlines, nor do they gain the significant attention

they require. We believe that climate change is such a

threat. For the Maldives, the effects of global warming

pose an overwhelming threat to our infrastructure, our

economy and our very existence.

In an attempt to implement adaptation measures,

the Maldives has invested in water and sanitation

projects and coastal defences and is attempting to

develop voluntary resettlement programmes to more

viable islands within the country. We are also investing

in a low-carbon future that emphasizes renewable

energy and other green projects to achieve our goal of

becoming carbon neutral by 2020.

It is obvious that our actions alone cannot save

us. The global community must act. Regional

initiatives that complement United Nations Framework

Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) processes

must be pursued. Weeks before Copenhagen, the

Maldives convened a group of countries and formed

the Climate Vulnerable Forum to declare our concerns

with a united voice. I am pleased to report today that

Kiribati will take over the leadership of this group

ahead of the sixteenth session of the Conference of the

Parties to the UNFCCC in Cancún this year, and that

Bangladesh will steer it to the seventeenth session in

South Africa next year.

The Asian region is one of the most vulnerable to

climate change. We recognize that failure to extend

emissions targets beyond 2012 will leave 60 per cent of

the world’s population without durable solutions for

the global warming effects already being felt. Threats

to food and water security for the world’s most

susceptible populations will undoubtedly perpetuate

disease, exacerbate conflicts and threaten to erode

decades of hard-won successes achieved by countries

throughout the region.

While we have high hopes for the ensuing

sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth sessions of the

Conference, we believe that alternative solutions that

harmonize the development needs of industrial States

with the human and economic rights of vulnerable

peoples should exist. Therefore, the people of the

Maldives and Timor-Leste call for an Asian initiative

that would forge a consortium of Asian countries and

regional partnerships. This will aim to enable our

region to aid the world’s most vulnerable States.

The Maldives believes that it is time to let go of

the mistrust and blame that has plagued the UNFCCC

process. We welcome the recent voluntary initiative of

India to curb its emissions and its commitment to

promoting green energy without waiting for others to

follow suit. We call upon all nations large and small to

come together in a cooperative spirit in Cancún so that

we may effectively establish and promote mitigation

activities that will restore our native carbon sinks,

increase energy efficiency, reduce emissions and

preserve our ecosystems.

The Maldives would also like to state its support

of the Group of Four position for reform of the

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Security Council. We believe that an expansion of

permanent membership to reflect the realities of our

contemporary international system will improve

representation in the Council and better serve to

address a panoply of concerns facing nations in all five

regions today.

The Maldives also continues to grapple with

traditional security threats. The scourge of terrorism

and the growing menace of piracy threaten national,

economic and maritime security throughout our region

and around the world. Yet deficits in the capacity to

attribute criminal accountability to the perpetrators of

terrorism persist. Our failure is marked by the advances

in the modus operandi of terrorists, the proliferation of

illegal technology transfer, and the surge in the trade of

illicit weapons. The Maldives cannot stress enough the

importance of this Assembly’s finalizing the draft

convention on terrorism.

Our geographical location in the Indian Ocean

makes the Maldives particularly vulnerable to threats

to its maritime security, as our vast open waters

continue to prove difficult to police. We are deeply

concerned over the surge in piracy that has moved

beyond the Gulf of Aden into the Indian Ocean. If the

international community does not increase its efforts,

we fear that piracy may end up turning into an

uncontrolled threat to security in the region. Thus, we

were particularly encouraged by the adoption of

Security Council resolution 1897 (2009) and are

pleased with the work of the Contact Group on Piracy

off the Coast of Somalia. We feel, however, that it is

important for the Group to urgently establish an easily

accessible legal toolkit for States that enables them to

fill the vacuums in their national legal systems and

address piracy in a comprehensive manner.

The continued suffering of the Palestinian people

deeply saddens the Maldives. They have been denied

their right to self-determination and their right to live

in peace and freedom in their own independent State

for far too long. While recognizing the rights of the

Palestinians, we also appreciate and support the right

of the people of Israel to live in peace and security

alongside an independent and sovereign State of

Palestine. We continue our call for all sides to use the

ongoing peace talks as an opportunity to resolve their

differences, and are therefore heartened by the new

initiatives being pursued by the United States in its

pursuit of a Middle East peace treaty. Furthermore, we

call for continued support for the Governments of

Jordan and Egypt in their work on the Arab Peace

Initiative, which we believe may provide an enduring

solution to the conflict for the people of the region.

Additionally, our pursuit of a more secure and

just world and our respect for international law were

the basis of the Maldives’ recognition of the

independence of Kosovo, declared on 17 February

2008. The Maldives believes that the declaration of

independence by the people of Kosovo reflects a last-

resort remedy that embodies the best prospects for

peace and stability in the region. The Maldives also

welcomes the advisory opinion of the International

Court of Justice on the unilateral declaration of

independence in respect of Kosovo, issued on 22 July

2010, which concluded that that declaration of the

independence of Kosovo did not violate international

law. While we have been disappointed by recent efforts

to reverse this judgment, the Maldives welcomes the

alternative solution, contained in the unanimously

adopted European Union-sponsored resolution 64/298,

as a positive step towards Kosovo’s assumption of full

United Nations membership.

Closer to home, the Maldives has borne witness

to advances in democracy, sustainable development,

and peacebuilding throughout the region of the South

Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Notably,

we praise the progress made by the Islamic Republic of

Afghanistan, including the development of democratic

institutions, as well as improvements in the areas of

health, education and the status of women. We wish the

Afghans continued success in their efforts to rebuild

their long-suffering nation, and implore the

international community to maintain their support of

the Afghan people.

Furthermore, the Maldives welcomes Sri Lanka’s

success in its ongoing consolidation of peace and

democracy, and we call upon the international

community to support that country in its reconciliation

efforts, as well as in its efforts to rebuild a nation torn

apart by 25 years of sustained conflict.

We are a small nation with big dreams. Our

dreams are rooted in the vision of the Charter that

binds the membership of this Assembly together here

today. Our hopes are inextricably linked to the fears of

the past that inspired this body and to the hopes of

those who dream of a future grounded in justice,

equity, opportunity and peace for peoples of the North

and South, in nations large and small. Our humanity

9 10-55122

defines our obstacles, but we believe that our dreams

for a better future defy our limitations.