United Kingdom, 2004

Mr. President, I

offer my congratulations and those of my country on

your election as President of the General Assembly at

its fifty-ninth session.

Eighteen months ago, the United Nations faced

divisions more serious than any since the Cuban

missile crisis of October 1962. We all worried whether

the strength and unity which we had built up since the

end of the cold war could survive.

Then last year we watched, as Secretary-General

Kofi Annan stood at his now famous fork in the road.

In the year since, almost instinctively, we have decided

to follow our Secretary-Generalís directions. This

Organization has not been plunged, as some predicted,

into paralysis; instead, I have felt a powerful if

unspoken determination to make the United Nations

work, and to work more effectively, to fulfil its central

task: to secure peace around the world.

Over the last 12 months we have dealt with new

crises such as that in Darfur in the Sudan, where we

have set clear tasks for both the Sudanese Government

and the rebel groups. We have tackled the situation in

the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Great

Lakes; mobilized international support for the new

Iraq; and addressed a long list of hugely important

subjects which rarely receive the coverage they should

in the media ó Haiti, Georgia, Timor-Leste,

Bougainville and Western Sahara.

We have shown in those actions the unity of

purpose which is one of the strongest weapons in our

hands to defeat the evils which today affect the globe.

And the search for consensus has not been confined to

the Security Council.

I am proud that just a few months after the

difficult times of early last year, France, Germany and

the United Kingdom came together to work, as we

continue to do, on the Iran dossier before the

International Atomic Energy Agency.

I recognize, of course, the frustrations which all

of us feel, not least over the Israel-Palestine conflict,

where the clear path to peace set out in the road map

and endorsed by the Security Council remains elusive.

But all in all we have shown the will to make collective

action work, though we know, too, that we need to go

further.

In particular, we need to get better at tackling

threats which have changed dramatically since the

founding of the United Nations. Today the greatest

threats to our security often come not from other

functioning sovereign States, but from terrorist

organizations, from failing States and from man-made

shocks to our environment like climate change, which

can exacerbate State failure and breed internal

instability.

The High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and

Change appointed by the Secretary-General is

preparing its recommendations on ways to address the

various challenges. We should remember in all this that

we have one great advantage. Though its institutions

and the founding text of the Charter has hardly

changed in 60 years, the United Nations is not an

organization set in stone, but a set of living institutions

based on a shared will to make collective security

work. The United Nations has adapted in the past -

with the development of peacekeeping, a greater focus

on individual rights and the setting of global targets for

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development - and I am confident that it can adapt in

the future.

Of course, institutional change is part of that. At

the United Nations foundation, one eighth of its

members could expect to be elected members of the

Security Council at any one time. Today that

proportion is less than one eighteenth. The United

Kingdom has long supported the case for expanding

the Security Council to, say, 24 members, and for

including amongst the permanent members: Germany

and Japan, two countries which between them

contribute 28 per cent of the budget of the United

Nations; India, which represents one sixth of the entire

worldís population; and Brazil, which just missed

permanent membership back in 1945.

But we should not see an expansion of the

Security Council, or other institutional change, as a

panacea. The biggest need is to adapt our common

understanding - the United Nations jurisprudence, if

you like - and its operational effectiveness so that we

can respond more quickly and more thoroughly to

todayís new threats.

Let me highlight three areas which to me seem

particularly important: first, our approach must be

broader and must tackle threats to the most vulnerable,

including poverty, disease and environmental

degradation; secondly, we must build a new consensus by

expanding the scope of collective action; and, thirdly, we

must deal with the threat of terrorism, which menaces

us all and everything for which we stand.

Let me now take these three points in turn. First,

there is the need for a broader approach which

addresses the complex and interdependent nature of

security today. Here, we have to do more to meet the

Millennium Development Goals and to promote

sustainable development, especially in Africa. We

cannot have security without development or

development without security.

As the Secretary-General highlighted in his

speech this week, we have to do more to entrench the

rule of law and justice, especially in States recovering

from conflict. The United Kingdom will pursue work

on the Secretary-Generalís report during its Security

Council presidency next month.

We could also use the United Nations better, to

agree to monitor and help implement globally accepted

norms of good governance.

And we need to act together quickly on climate

change, perhaps the greatest long-term threat to our

world in terms of stability and security. We have to

implement Kyoto - and I greatly welcome what my

colleague, His Excellency Sergey Lavrov had to say on

that today - and agree to emission reductions beyond

2012.

My second point is the need to build a new

consensus on the scope of collective action. We all

represent independent, sovereign states. But even as we

founded the United Nations we recognized that

sovereignty was a trust in the hands of a nationís

government: there to be respected, not abused, from

either without or within.

The Charter set out arrangements so that an abuse

from without could be dealt with through the inherent

right of self-defence recognized in Article 51 of the

Charter. But it also said that an abuse from within

which threatens the peace could and should be dealt

with by the Security Council, under the powers

enshrined in the other articles of Chapter VII of the

Charter, and by the many conventions concluded

within the United Nations framework, including, for

example, the 1948 Geneva Convention. No longer -

we all said - could or should the world turn away

from unspeakable barbarities like that of the Holocaust.

But we have not always lived up to those high

expectations, as the tragedies of Rwanda and Bosnia

ten years ago reminded us. Today we must resolve to

do so and to engage in situations of humanitarian

catastrophe or grave violations of international

humanitarian law and to act in the face of other threats

to international peace and security.

The principle of non-interference has to be

qualified by a duty to protect, especially where

Governments are failing in that duty.

We therefore need, for example, to be ready to

support greater use by the Secretary-General of his

powers under Article 99 of the Charter, to bring threats

to peace to the Security Council's attention. We have to

act quickly in response, because prevention is far better

than cure. We should look to work more closely with

regional organizations, as we are doing with the

African Union in Darfur. We need more discussion on

the criteria as to when the international community

might have to intervene with military force in extreme

circumstances. We must get better at engaging for the

long term in countries recovering from conflict,

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coordinating our efforts in response to locally agreed

priorities.

My third point is the urgent need to combat

global terrorism, a menace directed at us all. If we have

learned anything in the three years since 11 September

2001 it is that international terrorism is indiscriminate

in its targets and merciless in its hatred. Christian, Jew,

Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim, people of no religion

or any religion, and of every or no shade of political

opinion, all have died through the terroristsí bullet or

bomb.

My friend Sergey Lavrov spoke eloquently a

moment ago about the tears still wet for the terrible,

unspeakable massacre of the young and innocent that

took place in Beslan. Sergey, your tears are my tears;

Russiaís tears are the worldís tears. We are all in the

fight against terrorism together.

Today in Iraq we are seeing again the depths to

which the terrorists plumb. The vast majority of the

victims of terrorism in Iraq are Iraqis. Our thoughts

and condolences are with the Government and people

of Iraq and with their families. But some of the victims

of terrorism in Iraq are foreigners who are helping

Iraqis to build a more stable and prosperous country.

One of them is Kenneth Bigley, a British engineer held

hostage by terrorists who have already barbarically

murdered his two American comrades. Our thoughts

and prayers are with their families. We continue to do

all we can to secure Mr. Bigleyís release.

I know - how could I forget - that opinions

have differed over the rightness of the military action

taken in Iraq 18 months ago. But I warrant that no

nation is in favour of the terrorist insurgency now

occurring there. For we all recognize that what is being

attempted by the terrorists in Iraq is an attack both on

the Iraqi people and on everything for which the

Organization stands: safety, security and human rights.

We have to come together to defeat the terrorists and

their despicable aims.

The threat of terrorism confronts democratic,

properly functioning States with an acute dilemma,

namely, how to fight those who recognize none of the

values for which we stand while remaining true to

those values. Our commitments under international

conventions express many of those values and the

importance that we attach to them. But equally, those

conventions cannot be allowed to shelter those

involved in terrorism. The conventions were designed

to protect citizens from abuse by States, not by

terrorists.

The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of

Refugees protects those with a well-founded fear of

persecution. I am proud that the United Kingdom and so

many other nations have offered that protection when and

where it was required. But as the 1951 Convention

itself sets out, asylum is not an unqualified right. It does

not apply to anyone who has committed a war crime, a

crime against humanity or other serious crime; nor

does it apply to anyone who is guilty of acts contrary

to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

We must never stoop to the level of the terrorist ó

to torture, mistreatment or unjustified incarceration ó

nor will any country within the European Union be

party to the return of suspects to such conditions, nor

to face the death penalty. But we cannot let terrorists

exploit a protection designed for the persecuted, not

the persecutors. We in the United Kingdom shall

therefore be working closely with Russia on its

important draft Security Council resolution, to see how

best we can prevent those who commit, support and

finance terrorism from sheltering behind a refugee

status to which they are not entitled. Along with the

Russian Federation and other partners in the Security

Council, we also wish to look at ways to ensure the

speedier extradition of such individuals.

We, the United Nations, have over the last year

begun to show a new determination to come together

and to make collective action work. A year from now,

we will meet again here to review the

recommendations of the High-level Panel on Threats,

Challenges and Change, as well as the Millennium

Development Goals, and to set the United Nations

agenda for the next decade. The United Kingdomís

chairmanship of the G-8 next year will focus on

tackling climate change and on Africa, on which the

Independent Commission for Africa will be producing

recommendations as to how best we can support the

radical agenda for change and development designed

by Africa itself through the New Partnership for

Africaís Development and the African Union. Our

presidency of the European Union will help us to lead

efforts for a successful outcome in the Doha

Development Round, and for building the European

Unionís crisis-management capabilities.

More than ever, global security is our shared

responsibility. In the year ahead, as we continue to

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adapt to todayís threats and challenges, we must find

renewed determination and political will to make

collective security work. The United Kingdom is

determined to play its full part in that endeavour.