Estonia

Allow me to begin, Sir, by congratulating you on your election as President of the General Assembly at its fifty-fifth session. I wish you all the best in carrying out your duties. I would also like to welcome the Republic of Tuvalu to the United Nations. Last week my Prime Minister, Mart Laar, spoke to the Millennium Summit on a number of issues Estonia sees as being especially salient to the United Nations this year. In my brief remarks today, I would like to underline four in particular: first, the need to reform the Security Council; secondly, efforts to raise the effectiveness of peacekeeping; thirdly, the importance of narrowing the global gap between rich and poor; and, fourthly, the role of information technology in furthering development. The first concerns efforts to reform the Security Council. The strong executive power vested in the Council was originally designed for the Council to provide a venue for speedy decisions and subsequent action. In practice, however, the Council is increasingly prone to indecisive waffling, which in turn undermines its own authority and credibility, and thus its effectiveness. In order to combat that effect, Estonia believes that the voting procedures and mechanisms governing the work of the United Nations most powerful body must be revamped. One such procedure that deserves our attention is the veto. Some permanent members of the Security Council have used the veto, or have threatened to do so, in order to advance their own domestic and foreign policy interests, irrelevant to the particular issue at hand. Because the Security Council derives its legitimacy from all Member States, it is the duty of the permanent members to exercise their veto power responsibly. The composition of the Council, which still reflects the power relationships current in 1945, is another issue that calls out for resolution. From the inception of the United Nations that year until just a decade ago the people of my country were afforded only rare glimpses of the goings-on at the United Nations through tears in the fabric of the Iron Curtain. When we finally re-established our independence, in 1991, we emerged onto the international arena only to 27 discover that the Security Council, judging by its composition, was still stuck back in 1945. This strikes Estonia as being anachronistic, if not wrongheaded. The guarantors of, and greatest contributors to, stability in the world have in the course of half a century changed fundamentally. We need not fear opening a discussion on whether the moral and legal reasoning underlying Security Council membership in the wake of the Second World War is still appropriate for the twenty-first century. If countries have fundamentally changed, so should, and so can, the United Nations. My second point regards peacekeeping. Earlier this year my Government decided to forgo the discount rate that meant paying only 20 per cent of our peacekeeping assessment. Instead, we voluntarily and unilaterally opted to shoulder 100 per cent of what is expected of us. This is because Estonia regards peacekeeping as being among the United Nations most crucial assignments in fulfilling its historical mandate of collective security. Security cannot be had at discount prices. That is why Estonia is willing to pay more for what we hope will be a better product. Paying our own way is not enough to raise the effectiveness of peacekeeping, however. What we require, as Prime Minister Tony Blair said here last week, is a far broader concept of security. The Security Council took an important step last week towards ensuring the security of people and frontiers with its unanimous resolution to overhaul United Nations peacekeeping operations. Those changes should create a more potent and better financed force that can react quickly where needed. My third point focuses on the need to increase equality around the globe. In his millennium report, the Secretary-General called on all of us to focus on the eradication of poverty. We can go a long way towards levelling the playing field for all peoples by alleviating debt and allocating more resources for development assistance. It is not as simple as that, however. As my Prime Minister, Mart Laar, said here last week, these efforts must go hand in hand with good governance and open markets. Without a commitment to these two elements, no amount of aid or debt relief will bring us closer to our intended goal. The idea that open governments and open markets are a prerequisite for good economic performance leads me to my fourth and final point, namely, the role of information and communications technology in furthering development. In his millennium report, the Secretary-General rightly stressed the need to ensure that the fruits of new technologies, especially information technology, are available to all. I personally took part in the High-level Panel of Experts on Information and Communication Technology, held here at the United Nations last April, because we have some experience in these matters. Estonia has the honour of finding itself among the 20 most computerized nations in the world. More importantly, we have done this not as a rich country, but as a nation with rather modest means. Among the Panel's most important findings was the undisputed, if not terribly original, conclusion that information technology programmes are, in fact, beneficial for development. Computer technology can be a wedge, or it can be a bridge. It need not follow that poor nations fall ever behind. Policies can be implemented, as we have discovered, that turn the “digital divide” into a “digital dividend”. We have seen this in my country firsthand through our Tiger Leap programme whereby every school in Estonia has, for some time now, been connected to the Internet. Even more clearly, we have witnessed how access to information technology has brought new possibilities to rural areas, the areas which often bear the brunt of change. This is why Estonia wholeheartedly endorses, and will actively participate in, the United Nations plans to assist all Members in making the information technology dream a reality.