I congratulate Sheikha
Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa on assuming the presidency of
the General Assembly at its sixty-first session. I also
commend her predecessor, Jan Eliasson of Sweden, for
his outstanding performance as President of the
General Assembly at the preceding session.
I acknowledge and pay tribute to Secretary-
General Kofi Annan for his many years of dedication
to the United Nations. The Government and people of
the Bahamas are profoundly grateful to Secretary-
General Annan for all that he has done for the United
Nations, and I look forward to welcoming him one day
to the Bahamas so that we might thank him personally.
I also congratulate and welcome Montenegro as
the 192nd State Member of the United Nations and
convey the best wishes of the Government of the
Bahamas for the prosperity and welfare of all its
people.
The Bahamas stands for democracy, the rule of
law and the right to self-determination. In this very
body, before the Committee of 24 on decolonization,
our national leaders made the case for the
independence of our country. We were able to achieve
that in 1973, and ever since then successive
administrations have voiced the Bahamas’ support of
the same principles. I do so again today. In doing so, I
remind this body that the Bahamas and the region of
which it is a part are shining examples to all the world
of all of those principles. Within the next year, the
Bahamian people will again have the opportunity to
choose their Government in a general election based on
universal adult suffrage. There have been, within the
past year in our region, similar general elections in St.
Vincent and the Grenadines and Guyana. The Bahamas
does not support the use of the military in Government
or to overthrow legitimately elected Governments.
Wherever that occurs, it must be deplored and there
must be a return to constitutional democratic rule
within the shortest possible time.
In our foreign policy, the Bahamas believes in
peace with all nations and we seek to avoid ideological
battles. Ours is a policy that avoids extremism, while at
the same time letting our voice be heard for the
dispossessed. We have the right to be here to speak for
ourselves and to speak for those who cannot speak. Our
people have fought for their voice to be heard and they
will be heard.
My delegation welcomes the attempt by the
Security Council to increase the transparency of the
selection process in that body for the post of Secretary-
General by apprising the President of the General
Assembly of its proposed actions on this matter and on
the results of the straw polls. We would take this
opportunity to assure this body that whoever succeeds
to the post will have our support and cooperation.
It was just over a year ago that we adopted the
2005 World Summit Outcome Document that has
served as the road map for reform efforts over the past
12 months. The Bahamas, like other States Members of
this Organization, is pleased that a number of reforms
have been implemented. In that regard, we note the
Peacebuilding Commission and the Human Rights
Council. With regard to the Human Rights Council, we
hope that it will evolve as an entity dedicated to a
process of constructive dialogue and cooperation in
which all countries may participate on an equal
footing.
The Bahamas renews its commitment to the
Millennium Development Goals, and in particular to
universal education, fighting HIV/AIDS, equality for
women and cutting poverty in half by 2015. The
country’s international, award-winning Urban Renewal
Initiative has begun to address in particular the issue of
poverty in the Bahamas. The further reform of the
Economic and Social Council should lead to its being
17 06-53615
empowered to implement the internationally agreed
development goals and commitments to the eradication
of poverty, hunger and all other ills that continue to
plague humanity.
I turn now to the United Nations Global Counter-
Terrorism Strategy and the issue of regional global
security. We renew our commitments in that area.
However, as we have done for the past four years, we
want to take the opportunity to further define our
security interests as not being limited to the strategies
defined by a narrow view of counter-terrorism. We
believe that counter-terrorism strategies should be
informed by a much broader definition, namely, as
ensuring the stability of our societies as we fight our
vulnerabilities to drug traffickers, natural and
environmental disasters and poverty, and our
challenges with education and health care. In
particular, we call upon the developed economies in
our region and further afield to remember their moral
and legal obligations to stop the assault of small arms
on our societies, to cooperate in stopping the flow of
drugs through our region, and to work together with us
in declaring the Caribbean Sea and its environs to be a
nuclear-free zone. There must be a strategic alliance
between developed economies and those in our region
to ensure that those security vulnerabilities are
minimized, if not eliminated.
The Bahamas is greatly heartened by the fact that
Member States have agreed on the text of the
convention on the rights of persons with disabilities,
which is to be adopted by the General Assembly in the
months ahead. That landmark convention recognizes
the importance for persons with disabilities of their
individual autonomy and independence, including the
freedom to make their own choices, and it
acknowledges that those persons should have the
opportunity to be actively involved in decision-making
processes about policies and programmes, particularly
those of direct concern to them. That is an important
step in empowering not only persons with disabilities,
but also the neighbourhoods, communities, societies
and countries in which they live. For too long, persons
with disabilities have been marginalized in many
settings, depriving them of their rights as citizens and
depriving society of the many contributions they could
make in the exercise of their full and unimpeded
participation. The Bahamas plans legislation to further
empower the disabled during the current session of our
Parliament.
It has often been said that reform is a process and
not an event. We continue to support reform of the
Security Council so that it may more accurately reflect
the interests and balance of power in the realities of the
twenty-first century, including allowing small island
developing States to play a greater role in its activities.
It is our hope that, during this sixty-first session of the
General Assembly, we will see some significant
movement in the reform of the Security Council.
Any reform would mean very little, however, if it
did not ultimately translate into the well-being of the
people of this planet. In that vein, the Bahamas will do
its part towards the implementation of the global
partnership for development and the translation of that
partnership into not only effective international,
multilateral economic, trading, financial and
environmental governance systems and mechanisms,
but also into the proliferation of healthy, productive
households and communities that contribute to
increased global welfare and security.
We want to take this opportunity to recall our
concern about coercive measures by developed States
that adversely affect the trade in services in the
Bahamian economy and in our region generally. We
reiterate our call for levelling the playing field and for
a global forum to address how the issue of a level
playing field can be translated into international public
policy.
The Bahamas welcomed and participated in the
recent High-level Dialogue on International Migration
and Development. At that time, the Bahamas outlined
the many positive impacts that international migration
had made on its economy and cultural development.
However, the Bahamas also noted the many challenges
the country had experienced over the previous 60 years
in managing migration, including those related to the
prevention of irregular or unauthorized migration.
For the Bahamas, irregular or unauthorized
migration has given rise to considerable challenges in
the social and educational sectors, as well as to serious
national security issues. In this regard, the Bahamas
has pledged to work with our partners in the region
towards the establishment of a better way to match the
supply with the demand for migration in safe, legal,
humane and orderly ways, in order to maximize the
societal and human development potential of global
labour mobility, with the involvement of private-sector
and public-sector stakeholders.
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The Bahamas is committed to sustainable
development. To a small-island developing State, there
are few things more important than securing the
necessary assistance in order to build resilience against
the many hazards that afflict the country on a
consistent basis, including violent storms or hurricanes,
which pass through our region even more frequently as
a result of global warming. In this connection, we look
to our partners in the region, the hemisphere and
around the world to reduce greenhouse gases. We call
on those countries that have not yet done so to sign the
Kyoto Protocol. It is also imperative that we all
commit ourselves to the development of alternative
sources of energy, in order to become less dependent
on the current polluting technologies that supply our
energy needs but threaten our sustainability.
The Bahamas would like to take this opportunity
to once again congratulate the people of one of our
regional partners, Haiti, on the election and installation
of its democratically elected Government. It is
imperative that the international community do all it
possibly can to help Haiti establish stability and
security and promote sustained and sustainable
development within its national borders.
As I have stated on previous occasions, the
Bahamas, which sits some 90 miles over the seas to the
north of Haiti, has a special interest in its stability and
prosperity. Instability in Haiti is bound to cause
instability in the Bahamas. A significant proportion of
the population in the Bahamas is either Haitian or of
Haitian descent. A migration crisis resulting from
instability in Haiti will have an immediate effect on the
Bahamas. Such a crisis would be difficult for our
country to endure and, with the will of the Haitian
community and the support of the world community,
we believe that it can and should be avoided.
The Bahamas has always made known its support
for the people of Haiti and their aspirations for peace,
security and development. We have and continue to
take seriously our commitment to assist the people of
Haiti in taking charge of their destiny and placing their
country on the path to enduring democracy and
development. The Bahamas believes that it is therefore
imperative that the promised international financial
assistance to Haiti is delivered in a timely and efficient
manner.
I would also like to take this opportunity to signal
my Government’s support for the upcoming Caribbean
Community (CARICOM) and Caribbean Common
Market initiative to encourage the United Nations to
mark and commemorate the 200th anniversary of the
abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 2007.
Slavery and the concomitant slave trade together stand
as one of the most vicious violations of human rights in
recorded history. As the global sentinel for human
rights, the United Nations has a duty to highlight the
200th anniversary of the cessation of this crime against
humanity with a special event in 2007. We hope that
this initiative will receive the wide and enthusiastic
support of this General Assembly and indeed of the
wider United Nations community.
This commemoration will present an ideal
opportunity to pay tribute to peoples of African descent
across the entire spectrum of the diaspora who share a
common heritage and, having survived the middle
passage, have gone on to form the bedrock on which
the prosperity of many developed countries has been
built. For its part, the Bahamas plans to undertake a
number of commemorative events including a festival
of arts which will run from March 2007 to January
2008. During the festival, a different country or region
of Africa will be showcased each month as a means of
exposing Bahamians to the rich culture of Africa
through theatre, art, music and dance.
One of the other challenges that we will face
during this session is reaching agreement on the scale
of assessments for the apportionment of expenses of
the United Nations for the next triennium. We look
forward to engaging with other Member States to
achieve a scale of assessments that is broadly based on
the principle of the capacity to pay, and that it is
transparent, equitable and stable.
The Bahamas continues to believe that the
Charter of the United Nations constitutes a viable and
firm foundation on which the Organization can balance
and achieve its objectives to maintain international
peace and security and to promote economic and social
progress. I want to take this opportunity to reaffirm the
commitment of the Bahamas to the principles
enshrined in that universal document, as well as to the
ongoing process of reform, which seeks to more
effectively translate these principles into real peace,
security and sustainable development for all the
world’s inhabitants. While dramatic progress may
sometimes evade us, we must not be swayed from our
course, and we must remain confident that our
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activities and efforts will benefit future generations.
Now more than ever we need the United Nations.