| Date | 14 October 2003 |
|---|---|
| Started | 10:00 |
| Ended | 12:55 |
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.
Mr. Gopinathan (India)
I would like to convey my delegation's appreciation to Ambassador John Negroponte, Permanent Representative of the United States and President of the Security Council, for his presentation to the General Assembly of the report of the Council for the period from 1 August 2002 to 31 July 2003.
Before proceeding further, I wish to convey a sense of our disappointment over the discontinuance of the practice, of convening an open meeting of the Security Council to consider its draft report to the General Assembly. As many of us will recall, the practice was instituted last year, at the initiative of Singapore, who is unfortunately no longer on the Council, with the intention of improving the quality and consideration of the report within the Council before its presentation to the General Assembly. We would like to voice our apprehension that this worthy practice, launched last year, might end up as an isolated attempt. In our view, this would be a disservice to the general membership, which stood to profit immensely from the views of members of the Council on how they themselves perceived and evaluated the work of the Council during the period under review. We would not like to infer that the discontinuation of this useful practice represents any weakening of the Council's collective resolve to continue with a sprit of reform and greater transparency in the working of the Security Council.
We agree with the conclusion contained in the report that the last 12 months have represented a steady increase in the workload of the Security Council. Admittedly, the Council has had to confront some of the most difficult issues during this period.
It would be remiss on our part not to reiterate our deep regret over the inability of the Council to reach satisfactory agreement on the issue of war and peace in Iraq in the first quarter of this year. We can only attribute the inability of the Council to arrive at a collective and unified decision on the major issues placed before it to the lack of balanced representation in its current composition.
The Prime Minister of India did touch upon this imbalance when he stated in his address to the current session of the Assembly on September 25, "For the Security Council to represent genuine multilateralism in its decisions and actions, its membership must reflect current world realities" (A/58/PV.11, p. 14). Within the United Nations, there is ample recognition of the need for the Organization and its architecture, in the maintenance of international peace and security, to adapt to the needs and realities of the times. The Secretary-General himself underscored this point when he said that to regain the confidence of States, and of world opinion, the Security Council must become "more broadly representative of the international community as a whole as well as the geo-political realities of today" (A/58/PV.7, p. 3).
The Council's preoccupation with Iraq did not, despite the best intentions of its members, afford it sufficient time for a more serious examination of other major issues on its agenda relating to the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. In the area of counter-terrorism, while every effort has been made by the Council to maintain the momentum achieved, mechanisms are yet to be put in place that would hold countries accountable for their genuine commitment to and actions in the fight against terrorism originating in territories under their control. The Council needs to move from the inexhaustible stage of helping to establish legal and financial frameworks to a more serious examination of the actual contributions -- or lack thereof -- by Member States to counter-terrorism efforts. Only by doing so would it have come to grips with the real issues at hand.
The non-permanent members of Security Council have taken upon themselves the responsibility, based on their long-term interests, to pursue the agenda of greater transparency and reform in the working of the Security Council. Unfortunately, this has not always been the case. In the period under review, new and ingenious methods appear to have been invented, designed to confuse and often exclude the general membership from specific projects being pursued in the Security Council.
We would like to comment, by way of illustration, on a few instances in the functioning of the Security Council that may be perceived as attempts to obfuscate or limit access to it by the general membership.
Delayed decision-making on the format of discussions to be followed is a case in point. In at least one instance, the President of the Council delayed a decision on the format of discussions to be followed on an important but controversial thematic topic until a very late stage, at which point the subject was declared open to the participation of the general membership. We are not in a position to fathom the reasons behind such actions. We can only hope that they were not intended to deny time for adequate preparations by delegations seeking to intervene on the given subject.
Mr. Gopinathan (India)
A second case in point is the Council's experimentation with different modes of participation under rule 37 of its provisional rules of procedure. The decision by the Council presidency to restrict participation in an open debate on an issue of import to a late stage and to only one or two candidates per region could, by its very selectivity, have resulted in acts of omission or exclusion. Moreover, as is well known, some regional groups, such as the Asian Group, do not have the mandate to discuss and decide on issues other than elections. Such factors could well have added to the impracticability and undemocratic nature of the decision taken.
A third case in point is discrimination between members and non-members of the Council on time limits for statements. In a recent incident the President of the Council declared a time limit for statements during an open debate on a subject of considerable importance. However, while members of the Council were allowed to give full reign to their views without observing any time limit, the general membership was subjected to the strictest implementation of a restrictive time limit. That incident was considered serious enough to produce considerable adverse reaction at meetings of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Arab Group.
The discriminatory treatment between members and non-members of the Council tends to be pronounced during the so-called ministerial-level meetings of the Council, which now are held increasingly in two segments, one for the members and the other for the less privileged. In that context, we would also like to state that expecting non-members to be content with reading parts of their statements and circulating a longer text is unrealistic as long as the provisional verbatim records reflect only what is actually spoken in the formal meetings of the Council.
A fourth case in point is the surprise scheduling of open debates with selective notification. In a recent instance, an open debate of the Council was scheduled in response to a serious incident which occurred over a weekend. Some non-members of the Council did learn of the meeting and were able to make statements under rule 37. Others were fortunate if they happened to learn of the event from television broadcasts. The issue here continues to remain one of selectivity and arbitrariness.
I must hasten to point out that the issues referred to are not being raised with the intention of castigating those involved, but with the desire to bring to the attention of the larger membership of the General Assembly and the select membership of the Security Council the areas where greater transparency, predictability and some even-handedness would be welcome, and could add to the Council's effectiveness. In our view, if the Council followed some rules-of-thumb in its practices, it would go a long way in assuring the general membership of the Council's sincerity in attempting to take into account the membership's concerns during Council deliberations. We shall attempt to list a few suggestions in that regard.
Unless an item is introduced in reaction to major events of the day, all open debates involving the participation of the general membership of the Organization must be announced at the beginning of the month, when the programme of work is presented and adopted. Surprise scheduling should be avoided wherever possible and, if absolutely unavoidable, measures to inform all members concerned through the mail or by facsimile, electronic mail or telephone communication to the relevant missions would be desirable.
All non-members of the Council wishing to participate under rule 37 of the Council's provisional rules of procedure should be allowed the time they require to convey their views. If that is not possible due to the exigencies of the situation -- and we believe this should be truly exceptional -- a standard pre-announced time limit should be imposed upon all, members and non-members alike, without any discrimination.
The increasing resort to new and fanciful thematic issues as the crowning glory of non-permanent member presidencies should be rationalized and restricted, in order to better utilize the time available for the consideration of pressing current issues relating to the maintenance of international peace and security.
The idea of wrap-up sessions, presumably conceived to allow for stock-taking at the end of a month's work, should not be utilized to promote controversial issues that selectively advance the national agendas of members concerned.
Briefings by Council presidencies to non-members of the Council tend to be arbitrary and ad hoc in their scheduling. Some presidencies tend to attach due importance to that process, while others have been indifferent to this requirement. It has been observed that, in several instances, despite the scheduling of briefings to the general membership, such briefings either do not take place at all or are carried out in a perfunctory manner. In fact, briefings to the media are far more comprehensive and regular than those to non-members. Briefings by Council presidencies need to be regular, thorough and qualitative if the Council is to fulfil its commitment to ensuring adequate transparency in its functioning among Member States of the Organization.
In conclusion, we express the hope that the existing and aspiring non-permanent members of the Council will take up with renewed vigour the process of improving the accountability and working methods of the Security Council in a manner that would bring it into a more harmonious functional relationship with the larger membership of the United Nations.
Mr. Thamrin (Indonesia)
--> -->
| <type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'> | Python 2.6.6: /usr/bin/python Thu Jun 20 09:31:52 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_58/meeting_30' |
| /data/vhost/www.undemocracy.com/docs/trunk.py in maintrunk(pathpart='/generalassembly_58/meeting_30') |
| 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-58-PV.30', 'gadice': '', 'gameeting': 30, 'gasession': 58, 'highlightdoclink': None, 'htmlfile': '/home/undemocracy/undata/html/A-58-PV.30.html', 'pagefunc': 'gameeting', 'pdfinfo': <pdfinfo.PdfInfo instance>} |
| /home/undemocracy/unparse-live/web2/unpvmeeting.py in WriteHTML(fhtml='/home/undemocracy/undata/html/A-58-PV.30.html', pdfinfo=<pdfinfo.PdfInfo instance>, gadice='', 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'pg003-bk01', dtextmu = u'<h3 class="speaker"> <span class="name">Mr. Tham...jective after national or narrower interests.</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. Tham...jective after national or narrower interests.</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. Tham...jective after national or narrower interests.</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'\xf6' in position 1719: ordinal not in range(128)
args =
('ascii', u'\n\t<p id="pg003-bk01-pa01">It is a pleasure for m...jective after national or narrower interests.</p>', 1719, 1720, 'ordinal not in range(128)')
encoding =
'ascii'
end =
1720
message =
''
object =
u'\n\t<p id="pg003-bk01-pa01">It is a pleasure for m...jective after national or narrower interests.</p>'
reason =
'ordinal not in range(128)'
start =
1719