Let me begin by
congratulating you, Madam President, on your election
to the presidency of the General Assembly at this
session. I am especially pleased to see a woman in this
important position after a break of nearly 30 years. I
join those who have expressed thanks to the Secretary-
General for his leadership and commitment in recent
years in addressing the very serious challenges facing
the international community.
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Allow me also to take this opportunity to
congratulate the Republic of Montenegro on its
accession to membership of the United Nations.
The commitment to global partnership for
development is a timely, yet sobering, theme in light of
the long road we have still to travel and the setbacks
already encountered. A major setback has been the
crisis in global trade talks. Trade can be the single most
important vehicle for global development, and we
should not let the opportunity presented to us by the
Doha Development Agenda slip from our grasp. We
must ensure that gains from trade liberalization benefit
the poor and are fairly distributed. Iceland remains
strongly committed to the Agenda.
Many developing countries, particularly in sub-
Saharan Africa, have little chance of achieving the
Millennium Development Goals by the target date,
unless significant additional resources are made
available. We welcome and support international
efforts for debt relief to the poorest countries. We also
applaud those countries that have committed to
increasing official development assistance. Iceland is
also shouldering its responsibility. Over the next three
years Iceland’s development assistance will have
almost tripled in size, and we are determined to do
even more. Beyond 2009 our assistance should
increase even further, with the ambition of reaching the
United Nations target of 0.7 per cent of gross national
income.
The global partnership rests on the principles of
transparency, accountability, good governance, equity
and commitment to poverty reduction. Iceland also
attaches special importance to the rights of women and
children. As the Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner,
Shirin Ebadi, so rightly pointed out in her Nobel Peace
Prize Lecture on 10 December 2003,
“To disregard women and bar them from active
participation in political, social, economic and
cultural life would in fact be tantamount to
depriving the entire population of every society
of half its capability.”
We want to see more determined efforts by
development partners and United Nations agencies to
pursue gender equality. The work of the United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) must be
given more weight within the United Nations. Iceland
has increased its support for the work of UNIFEM
more than tenfold over the past two years, and we will
increase our support even further.
The mission statement of the United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF) correctly insists that the
survival, protection and development of children are
central to human progress. Nobody questions this
statement, yet more than 10 million children die from
preventable causes every year. Iceland will further
increase its contributions to the vital work of UNICEF.
I am proud to say that the people of Iceland have been
particularly active and make the highest contribution
per capita of national societies to UNICEF.
At least half of the eight Millennium
Development Goals relate to resource use and
environmental conservation, that is, to sustainable
development. We will not be able to eradicate extreme
poverty or hunger if we cannot safeguard the
environment, the basis of food security around the
world. We cannot hope to reduce child mortality unless
we deal with the contamination of fresh water. There is
a close relationship between the health of the earth’s
ecosystem and human welfare, security and peace.
Icelanders base their livelihood on the living resources
of the sea and abundant renewable energy. Iceland rose
from relatively recent poverty to affluence through the
application of technological innovations and by
drawing on international cooperation. We are
convinced that our success could be replicated in many
other parts of the world, given the right incentives and
an enabling environment.
In this connection, I should like to refer in
particular to two areas of sustainable development:
ocean issues and energy issues.
Ocean issues have far-reaching development
implications. Ninety-five per cent of those who make
their living from fisheries are in the developing world.
A billion people depend on fisheries for their main
intake of protein. At the same time, we are seeing a
rapid increase in pollution of the ocean and depletion
of its living resources. That is why Iceland has
prioritized this area in its development cooperation and
in the work of the fisheries department of the United
Nations University in Iceland.
Energy issues also loom large. While Icelanders
enjoy the good fortune of having clean, renewable
energy for 70 per cent of our total energy use, energy
issues are increasingly becoming one of the main
drivers of the sustainable development agenda within
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the United Nations. Two billion people lack access to
electricity. All eight Millennium Development Goals
will require greater energy consumption.
Unfortunately, more energy consumption in most
cases means greater greenhouse gas emissions. One of
our greatest challenges today is to square the
development circle, to meet our development needs
while safeguarding the environment. One way certainly
is to increase substantially the share of renewables in
world energy demand. That is why Iceland is taking an
active part in promoting renewables and new
technologies through its development cooperation and
the work of the geothermal department of the United
Nations University. Another example of our
commitment in this area is the international seminar on
hydrogen use for the developing world, to be held in
Reykjavik later this week. It will be co-hosted by
Iceland and the United Nations Department of
Economic and Social Affairs.
Much has been achieved over the past 12 months
in implementing the outcome of the World Summit. In
this connection, I join others in expressing appreciation
for the outstanding work done by Jan Eliasson as
President of the General Assembly at its sixtieth
session. We now have a Peacebuilding Commission.
The new Human Rights Council has also been
established. It is the duty of all of us to make sure that
we strengthen its credibility and turn it into a powerful
defender and reinforcer of basic human rights. Its
credibility will depend to a large extent on its even-
handedness.
Useful work has already been done on internal
reform of the United Nations. The success of these
reforms — I think in particular of the mandate
review — will affect the long-term credibility of the
United Nations. It is with great interest and high hopes
that we await the outcome of the work of the High-
level Panel on System-wide Coherence.
Peace and security is fundamental to
implementing a global partnership for development. In
the face of the crippling effects of terrorism, we
welcome the agreement on the Global Counter-
Terrorism Strategy. In the fight against terrorism,
human rights must not be compromised; otherwise, we
undermine the values that we seek to defend. Torture
cannot be justified. As we have seen recently, years of
careful development can be reversed almost overnight
by war. Conflict prevention, restraint by the parties
involved and a commitment by other actors to urge
restraint, rather than encourage conflict, are also
fundamental to the partnership.
Sixty years ago, on 19 November 1946, Iceland
became a Member of the United Nations. Iceland has
since then strongly supported the principles of the
United Nations as written in the Charter. With the full
support of the other Nordic countries — Denmark,
Finland, Norway and Sweden — Iceland decided in
1998 to present for the first time its candidature for a
seat on the Security Council for the period 2009-2010,
with elections to be held in 2008. This candidature,
which was declared within the Western European and
Others Group in April 2000, is based on our readiness
to shoulder the responsibility of serving on the United
Nations body charged with maintaining and
strengthening peace and security. As one of the almost
100 smaller States of the United Nations, Iceland
makes every endeavour to cultivate mutually beneficial
relations with all Members of the Organization and
believes itself to be favourably positioned to exercise
with fairness and firmness the role of a Security
Council member.
The task of building a global partnership for
development is not easy. But it is the only way in
which we can realistically address the challenges
facing us, whether they be challenges of poverty,
security, the environment or health. As Secretary-
General Kofi Annan has put it, “the cause of larger
freedom can only be advanced by broad, deep and
sustained global cooperation among States”.