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.