 UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and UN Secretary-General of Kofi Annan, along with the Foreign Secretary (Jack Straw), UNA-UK Chair Sir Richard Jolly, and the Leader of the Lords (Baroness Valerie Amos), appeared together at the commencement of a half-day conference, at the Banqueting House in Whitehall on 10 February 2005, to mark the government launch of the UN High-level Panel report: 'A more secure world: our shared responsibility'.
UNA-UK was given a major role in this high-level event. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and FCO Minister Bill Rammell MP used the occasion to announce that UNA-UK would be conducting, on behalf of the Foreign Office, a series of regional public debates on the Report and its recommendations. Speaking warmly of his recollection from his school days of the work of UNA-UK, Jack Straw said that he hoped that these public debates would encourage a wider public interest in the UN reform proposals set out in the Report, and that they would also contribute to a reinvigoration of the work of UNA-UK.
Sir Richard Jolly, UNA-UK Chair, welcomed the Secretary-General to the UK and expressed his delight that UNA-UK had been tasked by the FCO to run the regional public debates on the High-level Panel Report. Endorsing the conclusions of the High-level Panel Report, he enjoined civil society to engage in discussion of its recommendations.
Prime Minister Tony Blair opened the event, strongly endorsing the Secretary-General’s position and describing him, to applause from the audience, as a “tremendous unifier”.
In a wide-ranging landmark speech the Secretary-General said that “today we face threats to world order and world peace of a kind and a scale that we have not seen since the height of the Cold War. But if we can agree on ways to respond effectively to those threats, we also have a unique opportunity to build a world that will be safer, fairer and freer.” While acknowledging that the most high-profile threats were terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, he stated that millions of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America faced “many other, more immediate threats - hunger, disease, environmental degradation, corrupt and oppressive government, civil and economic corruption…” Referring to Africa he said that “a combination of disease, starvation and deadly conflict is causing a disaster of tsunami proportions every few months…”
Referring to the High-level Panel report, Kofi Annan said that the:
“the overall message of the report is that the time is gone when each country, or even each continent, could look after its own security. The threats we face are threats to all of us. And they are linked to each other. We will not defeat terrorism unless we also tackle the causes of conflict and misgovernment in developing countries. And we will not defeat poverty so long as trade and investment in any major part of the world are inhibited by fear of violence or instability”.
He said that the most alarming of these threats was the possibility that terrorists could plant a “dirty bomb” in London or another major capital; “the loss of life would be shocking but as nothing to the social and economic effects” which would be felt around the world.
In relation to the agenda of the September 2005 World Summit, the Secretary-General said that he believed the summit offered a unique opportunity to bring all these issues together, and to deal also with the suggestions that had been made for the improvement of the UN itself. He continued:
“You see, the world does need a forum for collective decision-making and it needs an instrument of collective action. Our founders intended the United Nations to be both those things. Our task is to adapt and update it so that it can perform those functions in the 21st century.”
Turning to Iraq, Kofi Annan called on the world to assist the Iraqi people, under new elected leaders, to cast off their bitter legacy of war and dictatorship. He endorsed the Iraqi elections the previous week as a success, and said he was determined that the UN would help the Iraqi people to make the transition to a stable and democratic society. Stating that the UN was proud of the political and technical assistance it had given towards the election, he offered further help during the delicate stage of building a constitution. He said that his Special Representative in Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, was already trying to enlist groups who boycotted the election, but who are now willing to pursue their goals through peaceful dialogue and negotiations.Despite the recent “tortured history” of Iraq he called on the international community to support the Iraqi people in “their great experiment”. The UN, he said, had a “mandate from the Security Council to take the lead” in rallying theworld to this cause.
Click here to read the UN News summary of the Secretary-General's speech.
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