| Date | 20 October 1999 |
|---|---|
| Started | 10:00 |
| Ended | 13:25 |
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The Acting President
I give the floor to the President of the Security Council, His Excellency Mr. Sergey Lavrov, to introduce the report of the Security Council.
Mr. Lavrov (Russia)
It is my privilege to introduce to the General Assembly the annual report of the Security Council, covering the period from 16 June 1998 to 15 June 1999.
The members of the Security Council traditionally attach great importance to the timely preparation and presentation of this report, pursuant to Articles 15 and 24 of the United Nations Charter. As in previous years, the draft report was approved at a formal meeting of the Security Council. The members of the Security Council ensured that the report was submitted in a timely manner to the General Assembly before the beginning of the general debate at the current session. They are grateful to the staff of the Security Council secretariat for their professionalism and tireless efforts on behalf of the Security Council.
The report clearly shows that the Security Council's working agenda during the reporting period was extremely full and intense. Over 100 official meetings were held and 72 resolutions and 37 presidential statements adopted.
The range of issues considered by the Council remains very wide, covering all major aspects of the maintenance of international peace and security. Issues related to the settlement of regional conflicts and to ensuring stability in Africa remain high on the Council's agenda. Drawing on the results of its consideration of relevant reports of the Secretary-General, the Council adopted a number of specific long-term decisions in respect of these reports. The Council also paid close attention to the issues of preventing and settling conflicts and stabilizing the situation in the Balkan region. The adoption of resolution 1244 (1999) on the situation in Kosovo, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, has significantly strengthened the central role of the Council in the maintenance of international peace and security.
Issues related to the settlement of conflict situations in other regions, including the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, East Timor, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Georgia, figured prominently in the work of the Security Council.
A number of global aspects of the maintenance of international peace and security and joint efforts to combat international terrorism remain on the Council's agenda. In particular, decisions on post-conflict peace-building, the protection of and humanitarian assistance to refugees and other civilians during conflicts, and children in armed conflict were adopted. The discussions on these problems contribute to their due consideration by the General Assembly and other United Nations organs and help the Security Council better to fulfil the tasks assigned to it by the international community.
In the period covered by this report, the Security Council adopted several steps to improve its working methods and those of the sanctions committees, as well as to make the deliberations of its members more transparent to the general membership of the United Nations.
The present report, like last year's, has been prepared in the new format, reflecting the intention of Council members to ensure greater transparency in its work. The members of the Security Council hope that the report will provide useful and detailed information on the activities of the Council during the year. They attach great significance to the consideration of the report by the General Assembly as an important part of the dialogue between the two principal organs of the United Nations, and will duly take into account remarks and suggestions made by member States in the course of today's discussion.
Mr. Satoh (Japan)
I would like to thank the President of the Security Council, Ambassador Sergey Lavrov, for his articulate presentation of the annual report of the Security Council to the General Assembly.
We welcome the effort by the Council to share information on its activities with the rest of the United Nations membership.
Today, I would like to draw the attention of my colleagues to some of the important developments relating to the Security Council that are not recorded in the report, such as the growing involvement of non-Council members in the activities to facilitate and support the Security Council's actions on humanitarian crises. It is noteworthy that in recent years non-Council members have been increasingly engaged in efforts to complement the actions of the Security Council. The experiences of Kosovo and East Timor are cases in point.
On Kosovo, the Security Council failed initially to function effectively, although the Council was eventually called in to take over the issue. It was a combination of intensive efforts by some members of the Council and non-Council members that laid the groundwork for Council resolution 1244 (1999). Later the countries belonging to the Group of Friends on Kosovo also played a constructive role in helping the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo to carry out its task.
On East Timor, the Security Council could act very quickly, particularly as compared with the case of Kosovo, because the Indonesian Government cooperated flexibly with the Council. The Secretary-General played a crucial role in persuading the Indonesian Government to accept the international force. But we must not ignore the fact that the Indonesian Government listened carefully to quiet advice given by some friendly nations in the region, as it made critical decisions to respond flexibly to the call of the Secretary-General and the international public opinion behind him.
More important, it was the consultations and preparations by the countries in the region, if not by a regional organization, that paved the way for the successful implementation of the popular consultation on 30 August, and later for the quick establishment of an international force in East Timor, in accordance with Security Council resolution 1264 (1999).
In Africa, however, the Council acted almost single-handedly. The experience of Angola to date is most disappointing in this context. There, the Council issued resolution after resolution, only to see them unheeded and ignored by the warring parties. The Council imposed sanctions, but they were not observed. Ultimately, the Council had to withdraw its peacekeeping operation from that country.
While we welcome the Council's renewed initiative towards peace and national reconciliation in Angola, taken last Friday, this past year's unfortunate developments shed light not only on the difficulty the Council faces when it has to act in the sheer absence of a commitment to peace on the part of warring parties, but also on the importance of securing compliance with the decisions of the Council by countries in the region.
Indeed, there are encouraging examples of local initiatives to complement the Security Council's activity. For example, in Sierra Leone the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and its military sub-organization, the ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), as well as the countries in the region, have played a significant role in restoring and maintaining peace in the country. The tireless leadership of former President Nyerere, whom we lost recently, must be remembered as a driving force for peace in the process to bring stability to Burundi. And, the efforts of countries concerned and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) were also conducive to ensuring a ceasefire agreement for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Notwithstanding these encouraging initiatives by African countries and their regional groups, it is evident that support and assistance from the developed countries in the North are vitally important in order to prevent the recurrence of conflicts and humanitarian emergencies in Africa. Yet we have to admit that such support has so far been either too slow or too small, or both, particularly as compared with the cases of Kosovo and East Timor.
Need for stronger leadership on the part of the Security Council in drawing the international community's attention more to crises in Africa cannot be overemphasized. Equally important is a positive response from the international community to calls for help and support.
In the light of the situations I have described, there is no doubt that support from non-Council members is essential for the success of the Council's activities on humanitarian crises. It is therefore important for the Council to increase the transparency of its activities and to share what it knows with non-Council members.
To make the Security Council more effective and more credible is what all the Members of the United Nations now want. We have to admit that increased transparency does not necessarily lead to the enhanced effectiveness of the Security Council. However transparent the Council may become, or however many open meetings may be held, such steps alone would not automatically enhance the Council's effectiveness.
The Council's effectiveness can be enhanced by the efforts of its members to act promptly and effectively, and the responsibilities of the permanent members are particularly great in this regard. Equally important is that the Council's decisions should be respected and observed fully by the entire United Nations membership. We have already learned enough about this, and we are now required to redouble our efforts to practise what we have learned.
Mr. Yel'chenko (Ukraine)
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| <type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'> | Python 2.6.6: /usr/bin/python Thu Jun 20 05:26:24 2013 |
A problem occurred in a Python script. Here is the sequence of function calls leading up to the error, in the order they occurred.
| /data/vhost/www.undemocracy.com/docs/trunk.py in |
| 194 if __name__ == "__main__": |
| 195 pathpart = os.getenv("PATH_INFO") |
| 196 maintrunk(pathpart) |
| 197 |
| 198 |
| maintrunk = <function maintrunk>, pathpart = '/generalassembly_54/meeting_35/highlight_A-RES-51-193' |
| /data/vhost/www.undemocracy.com/docs/trunk.py in maintrunk(pathpart='/generalassembly_54/meeting_35/highlight_A-RES-51-193') |
| 131 elif pagefunc == "gameeting": |
| 132 LogIncomingDB(hmap["docid"], hmap["gadice"] or "0", referrer, ipaddress, useragent, remadeurl) |
| 133 WriteHTML(hmap["htmlfile"], hmap["pdfinfo"], hmap["gadice"], hmap["highlightdoclink"]) |
| 134 elif pagefunc == "agendanumexpanded": |
| 135 LogIncomingDB(pagefunc, hmap["agendanum"], referrer, ipaddress, useragent, remadeurl) |
| global WriteHTML = <function WriteHTML>, hmap = {'docid': 'A-54-PV.35', 'gadice': '', 'gameeting': 35, 'gasession': 54, 'highlightdoclink': 'A-RES-51-193', 'htmlfile': '/home/undemocracy/undata/html/A-54-PV.35.html', 'pagefunc': 'gameeting', 'pdfinfo': <pdfinfo.PdfInfo instance>} |
| /home/undemocracy/unparse-live/web2/unpvmeeting.py in WriteHTML(fhtml='/home/undemocracy/undata/html/A-54-PV.35.html', pdfinfo=<pdfinfo.PdfInfo instance>, gadice='', highlightth='A-RES-51-193') |
| 322 if dclass == "spoken": |
| 323 if not gadice or agendagidcurrent == gadice: |
| 324 WriteSpoken(gid, dtextmu, councilpresidentnation) |
| 325 elif dclass == "subheading": |
| 326 if agendagidcurrent and (not gadice or agendagidcurrent == gadice): |
| global WriteSpoken = <function WriteSpoken>, gid = u'pg003-bk01', dtextmu = u'<h3 class="speaker"> <span class="name">Mr. Yel\'... the United Nations and its Security Council.</p>', councilpresidentnation = None |
| /home/undemocracy/unparse-live/web2/unpvmeeting.py in WriteSpoken(gid=u'pg003-bk01', dtext=u'<h3 class="speaker"> <span class="name">Mr. Yel\'... the United Nations and its Security Council.</p>', councilpresidentnation=None) |
| 69 print '</cite>' |
| 70 |
| 71 print dtext[mspek.end(0):] |
| 72 |
| 73 print '</div>' |
| dtext = u'<h3 class="speaker"> <span class="name">Mr. Yel\'... the United Nations and its Security Council.</p>', mspek = <_sre.SRE_Match object>, mspek.end = <built-in method end of _sre.SRE_Match object> |
<type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'>: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 4367: ordinal not in range(128)
args =
('ascii', u'\n\t<p id="pg003-bk01-pa01">I should like to start... the United Nations and its Security Council.</p>', 4367, 4368, 'ordinal not in range(128)')
encoding =
'ascii'
end =
4368
message =
''
object =
u'\n\t<p id="pg003-bk01-pa01">I should like to start... the United Nations and its Security Council.</p>'
reason =
'ordinal not in range(128)'
start =
4367