| Date | 6 December 1999 |
|---|
Instructions
Click on the Link to this button beside the speech or paragraph to expand it to a useful panel containing:
- The date of the speech
- A link to the original page of the PDF document
- A URL that can be used in most blogs
- A structured Citation template suitable for use in a Wikipedia article.
Those last two rows ("URL" and "wiki") use textboxes to hide most of the text.
To access this text, right-click in the textbox with your mouse and choose "Select All", then right-click again and choose "Copy". Now you can right-click into another window and choose "Paste" to get the text.
Agenda item 23
Multilingualism
Report of the Secretary-General (A/54/478)
Draft resolution (A/54/L.37)
Mr. Dejammet (France)
It is my honour to introduce draft resolution A/54/L.37, on multilingualism, which was circulated on 1 December. The draft resolution is based on resolution 52/23 of 25 November 1997, which the General Assembly adopted by consensus.
I should like to announce that the following countries have joined the 69 original sponsors of the draft resolution: Albania, Austria, Belarus, Brazil, Bulgaria, the Central African Republic, Cape Verde, Chile, China, Egypt, Germany, India, Italy, Kuwait, Lesotho, Lithuania, Oman, Qatar and Yemen. This brings the total number of sponsors to 88.
The French delegation wishes at the outset to thank the Secretary-General for his excellent report.
The only element of draft resolution A/54/L.37 that differs from the text of resolution 52/23 is paragraph 2, which requests the Secretary-General to appoint a senior Secretariat official as coordinator of questions relating to multilingualism throughout the Secretariat.
Mr. Dejammet (France)
In connection with this simple and very concrete innovation, I would like to make the following brief comments. First of all, the adoption of this draft resolution will have no budgetary implications. It is not a question of recruiting a new official whose role would be to coordinate questions relating to multilingualism; it is a question of appointing from among existing personnel -- in other words, at no extra cost -- an administrator who would serve as a contact point for delegations on questions relating to multilingualism within the Secretariat. I have in mind, inter alia, questions that arise regularly that relate to interpretation, publication of documents in the six official languages, the development of the United Nations Internet site and the training of staff members in the official and working languages. In addition to this official's other activities, he or she would see to it that answers are given to questions raised by delegations in these fields. Since questions that deal with multilingualism relate to many aspects of the functioning of the United Nations, it is important for personnel and delegations concerned about the equitable use of various languages to have a single interlocutor.
This draft, then, is in no way a change in the system now in force in the United Nations. It is completely in line with the constant efforts that have been made since the adoption of the United Nations Charter to maintain parity among the official languages and the working languages of the various organs and to respect the principle of equality of languages. This is one of the elements that gives richness to international life and contributes to the promotion of cultural diversity.
The coordinator of multilingualism will therefore have an important role to play in preparing the report of the Secretary-General that we request for the fifty-sixth session of the General Assembly.
This is the objective of the draft resolution before the Assembly today. The list of sponsors of the draft attests to the importance that many Member States attach to this question. Multilingualism is, in fact, one of the key elements of the universal nature of this Organization.
Therefore, in conclusion, I express the hope that our Assembly will adopt the draft resolution by consensus.
Mr. Sulaiman (Syria)
--> -->
| <type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'> | Python 2.6.6: /usr/bin/python Thu May 23 07:00:25 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_70/pg016-bk02' |
| /data/vhost/www.undemocracy.com/docs/trunk.py in maintrunk(pathpart='/generalassembly_54/meeting_70/pg016-bk02') |
| 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.70', 'gadice': 'pg016-bk02', 'gameeting': 70, 'gasession': 54, 'highlightdoclink': None, 'htmlfile': '/home/undemocracy/undata/html/A-54-PV.70.html', 'pagefunc': 'gameeting', 'pdfinfo': <pdfinfo.PdfInfo instance>} |
| /home/undemocracy/unparse-live/web2/unpvmeeting.py in WriteHTML(fhtml='/home/undemocracy/undata/html/A-54-PV.70.html', pdfinfo=<pdfinfo.PdfInfo instance>, gadice='pg016-bk02', highlightth=None) |
| 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'pg017-bk03', dtextmu = u'<h3 class="speaker"> <span class="name">Mr. Sula...to as many of the world\'s people as possible.</p>', councilpresidentnation = None |
| /home/undemocracy/unparse-live/web2/unpvmeeting.py in WriteSpoken(gid=u'pg017-bk03', dtext=u'<h3 class="speaker"> <span class="name">Mr. Sula...to as many of the world\'s people as possible.</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. Sula...to as many of the world\'s people as possible.</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'\xe0' in position 5290: ordinal not in range(128)
args =
('ascii', u'\n\t<p id="pg017-bk03-pa01">The history of humanit...to as many of the world\'s people as possible.</p>', 5290, 5291, 'ordinal not in range(128)')
encoding =
'ascii'
end =
5291
message =
''
object =
u'\n\t<p id="pg017-bk03-pa01">The history of humanit...to as many of the world\'s people as possible.</p>'
reason =
'ordinal not in range(128)'
start =
5290