Uruguay

Allow me to begin by thanking the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Namibia, Mr. Theo-Ben Gurirab, for his work as President of the fifty-fourth session of the General Assembly, during which he continued and concluded the preparation process of the recent Millennium Summit, initiated during the preceding session. Likewise, I extend to the President of the Assembly at the fifty-fifth session, Mr. Harri Holkeri, former Prime Minister of Finland, our congratulations and best wishes for the success of his tenure. We also extend a fraternal welcome to Tuvalu as a new Member of the United Nations. 30 A little over a week ago the United Nations held its Millennium Summit. To be more precise, we held our Millennium Summit. The work of the Secretary- General and of the Member States deserves our praise, for the result of their efforts was wholly positive. We should all congratulate ourselves on that very successful work, but the task assigned to us by the Summit is now in our hands. It should begin with an assessment and careful evaluation of agreements, disagreements and priorities. Above all, we should pay special attention to the statements made by our heads of State and Government, as well as to the oral summary reports by each of the Presidents of the four round tables. Taken as a whole, this constitutes rich background material on which we could, and should, work. One could say that the General Assembly, as a universal and independent body, has been entrusted with a mandate by the highest political leaders of the Member States. Interpreting and carrying out that mandate is now the main objective of our work in the General Assembly. Of course, the Secretary-General's report (A/54/2000), known by the opening words of its title, “We the peoples”, is an essential contribution, widely appreciated at this time of putting the Organization in perspective. For that reason, the Secretary-General deserves our sincere acknowledgement. We can therefore say that never before have we had more authoritative or exact guidelines. As the Secretary-General said in his opening statement, the responsibility for putting those directives into practice is in our hands; in other words, in the non-exclusive framework of the General Assembly. From the very start of our renewed task we must try to identify some central ideas that reflect a general consensus on our point of departure, while acknowledging that neither the Summit nor any similar United Nations meetings will be able to make any arbitrary changes to the items on the world's agenda or alone bring about the alterations that practically all of us view as necessary and inevitable. It is therefore a matter of using the Millennium Summit as a launching platform for the achievement of the common objectives of the international community, whose main quality should be to reflect the basic rights and interests of all its members. We should, then, be as careful in identifying those goals as we are in selecting the procedures and determining the time required to achieve them. In any case, there are some realities that we cannot, and should not, evade. The first is the acknowledgement that the so- called globalization or universalization phenomenon constitutes the inescapable environment to which the human family should adapt, not from a stance of confrontation or resigned acceptance, but in order to be an active part of it. By living within the framework of globalization we will be in a position to direct and channel it, accepting its intrinsic values in its scientific and technological dimension, while conferring upon it the necessary inspiration and political will to control its negative effects on societies that lack the necessary resources to be part of globalization and to benefit from it. It has been said here at the Assembly that we should attempt to make it possible for all States to climb aboard the globalization train. That goal should motivate our individual actions and our cooperation efforts in the immediate future. As was repeatedly emphasized during the Summit, United Nations action of the kind I have described would have an encouraging and positive effect, especially since no other international institution has undertaken that task. Given the universal and all- inclusive nature of globalization, it is appropriate to consider what action the United Nations could take from the perspective of evolution and change of the international system in its three principal areas: first, the institutional political system — the Organization itself and its powers; secondly, the global financial system established by the Bretton Woods Agreements; and, finally, the organization of international trade within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO). With regard to the first, it must be admitted that in the process of reform of the Security Council, to which we have devoted so much effort, no significant progress has been registered recently. It would appear that the international community has not yet sufficiently assimilated its will to change at the institutional level. That admission does not take away from the fact that the reform of the Council is a pending matter and one which, as the round table reports indicated, received particular attention from the heads of State and Government at the Millennium Summit. 31 It seems to us that on this matter we have reached a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, there is practically a consensus on the need to reform the Council so that it can — on the basis of certain principles held very dear by the international community — more adequately reflect current reality, being made more democratic in its spirit, more representative in its structure and more transparent in its functioning. On the other hand, however, some believe that the formula proposed to achieve the goal of expanding the Council — an increase in both permanent and non-permanent members — disregards the very principles that we seek to implement. We have thus responded to the need felt by all for reform of the Council, in order to make it more representative and democratic, with formulas that do not yet appear to reflect the requisite universal spirit of reform. That is why we believe that, while we continue our efforts to reorganize the Security Council, we must also explore alternative solutions avoiding the approaches — perhaps too simplistic — adopted so far, which have not made progress possible, even after eight years of intensive negotiations. New approaches and ideas are needed in the reform of the Council more than in any other problem. Peacekeeping and international security continues to be a core issue giving the United Nations its specific character and, to a certain degree, its reason for being. The Organization's peacekeeping and international security mechanisms, the limits within which they can operate and their modalities have been on our agenda since the founding of the United Nations. They continue to require our attention, because problems of peace and international security manifest themselves in varying and sometimes unexpected ways as the world political situation evolves. The United Nations is now confronted with the worrisome problem of how to achieve its peacekeeping goals with limited resources and inadequate mechanisms. The report on peace operations prepared by a group of experts, known as the Brahimi report and drafted at the request of the Secretary-General, will undoubtedly help us find a way to overcome the difficulties now facing the Organization in this area. Uruguay, since 1952 a traditional contributor to peacekeeping operations, is carefully considering the recommendations contained in the Brahimi report, many of which we deem worthy of our support. In any event, we warmly welcome the initiatives aimed at a more in-depth consideration of what has been termed “humanitarian intervention”. We hope that a detailed and objective examination of this concept by the Organization will enable us to grasp its true scope and implications and to find ways of integrating it harmoniously into the international legal order, without any kind of distortion. The financing of peacekeeping operations requires the prudent management of existing resources and, as with the regular budget, that all Member States fulfil their financial obligations to the Organization, without conditions. Likewise, the institutionalization of the current scale of assessments is vital, perhaps with a few small changes that would not create problems for developing or least developed countries and that would ensure that States shoulder their responsibility according to their real capacity to pay. This is also our position on the regular budget. We cannot accept that, in determining the scale of assessments, simplistic formulas should be used that are based only on isolated economic indicators such as per capita income, which do not reflect the real economic situation of the country and of its population. We cannot overemphasize the link between the question of disarmament and that of development financing. The fact that the majority of violent conflicts occur in the developing sector of the world, in which there are often too many weapons and too few schools, remains a shameful paradox. We must continue to work towards disarmament. That is why my country, Uruguay, supports the convening of the United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, set to take place next year. Uruguay also supports the efforts of the “New Agenda” countries towards the elimination of nuclear weapons and encourages the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear- Test-Ban Treaty. As concerns the international financial system — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — and its handling of the recent, recurrent crisis situations in the world, shortcomings were noted in its methods of operation. In particular, its failure to anticipate those crises has made clear the need to update and reform the system directly responsible for ensuring global economic governance. In this effort to reorganize the financial institutions and to coordinate 32 their activities with those of the United Nations and its agencies, we should also consider the common aspiration of the majority of the members of the international community to democratize the decision- making processes in those organizations. The close connection between the decisions by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the social and economic realities of countries, more than justifies this aspiration. Inequality, poverty and debt in the developing world are problems that have been, and continue to be, emphasized in the debates of the Millennium Assembly. These problems require not only ongoing programmes and actions but, above all, a basic sense of solidarity, which does not always characterize our cooperation efforts. In the same vein, two noteworthy ideas were put forward during the Summit that we believe should be considered, because they could offer some guidance in efficiently addressing economic issues. The first is the idea of creating a development council that is neither dependent nor subordinate and that has the authority to take the decisions necessary to adjust and direct complex international financial flows, since the trends and developments in that respect affect the economies of all States. The second is related to international trade. In this regard, the international community is firmly convinced that international trade must be made increasingly open and free. The President of Uruguay, Mr. Jorge Batlle Ibáñez, in his address to the Summit and in the relevant round table, emphasized the indivisible nature of freedom, as a whole that cannot be separated from free trade. As trade is a natural and traditional method of communication among peoples, Member States must not impose protectionist barriers to its free flow, which would delay development and therefore affect the well- being of peoples. This could also lead to serious social problems, which in many cases could spiral out of control. In this way, obstacles to trade, discriminatory trade policies and protectionism could become factors of political instability at the domestic and international levels. This is the position of Uruguay within the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), in the relationship between MERCOSUR and the Andean Community, in the Free Trade Area of the Americas and in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The strong argument to that effect put forward at the Summit must not be disregarded by those Member States that singly or together selectively raise protectionist barriers in order selfishly to defend their own production and participation in the market, denying others what President Batlle has called “our right to create and produce and our right to offer and sell what is produced”. In this regard, I cannot but welcome the initiative of the Government of Italy, announced by its Prime Minister during the Summit, to insist, within international organisms — including within the Group of 8 — on the need for the developed countries to open their markets to the least developed countries by abolishing quotas and tariffs. Nor can the WTO cannot turn a deaf ear to this call. Although it does not play a major role in global financial governance, its regulations affect trade in its broadest sense, and it still counts among its responsibilities, set out at the Uruguay Round and in the Marrakesh agreements, the regulation of trade in agricultural products, which affects many of our countries, particularly those of Latin America and Africa. Today no one could doubt the role of the United Nations in the gradual process of achieving equality in the world. But the United Nations does not bear sole responsibility in this respect; the Member States and Governments do as well. A solid and hopeful future for the international community will depend on our good judgement and integrity. Also at stake is the trust of our peoples and of public opinion. Fortunately, for those of us who practise the democratic creed, that trust is always time- bound and subject to public opinion. Our ability to work within the Organization will determine whether the Millennium Summit that just took place will breathe new life into the United Nations. The world needs to see itself reflected in the institutions it established, with hope and participation, with responsibility and a will to build a fairer, more predictable, more peaceful and more humane society. I therefore believe — and this is merely a suggestion — that it is essential for all of us to ensure that the Assembly is accorded the important role assigned to it in the Charter, even though reality sometimes does not allow for this. We must ensure that 33 the Assembly and the Secretariat establish as soon as possible a working group or a similar mechanism that would follow up on the Millennium Summit and would examine the wealth of ideas put forward by our heads of State to ensure that they can be implemented and put into practice. Only in that way will the Millennium Summit be remembered.