EU Presidency Statement - 50 years of UN development cooperation

Mr. President,

I have the honor of speaking on behalf of the European Union. The Central and Eastern European countries associated with the European Union (Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary Latvia Lithuania, Poland, The Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia), and the other associated countries (Cyprus, Malta and Turkey) endorse this statement.

Mr. President,

The European Union would like to take the opportunity of this gathering to reiterate its deep attachment to United Nations operational activities for development. We regard those activities as one of the pillars of the UN's work to promote a peaceful and mutually supportive world. When in 1950 the General Assembly established the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance for development, it was the expression of a determination to equip the United Nations with an essential tool for achieving one of the goals of the UN Charter, namely to promote social progress and better standards of life.

Fifty years on, we have come an extremely long way. We are too apt to forget what progress has been achieved in essential areas like access to education, access to drinking water, vaccination and reducing infant mortality. This anniversary must be the occasion for remembering that progress and the role of the United Nations in achieving it.

But it is not my purpose here to take stock of half a century of effort to promote development or, for that matter, to give you a potted history of United Nations institutional developments in the area which concerns us here today.

I want above all to take the opportunity of this gathering to say that the Member States of the European Union consider international development cooperation, especially that conducted by the United Nations, to be more essential than ever.

Enormous progress has indeed been made. But there is so much left to do. We live in a world which enjoys unprecedented global wealth, half of whose inhabitants, however, survive on less than two dollars a day; a world in which nearly 800 million people are still hungry. New opportunities arise but so do new challenges. The High-level Segment of this ECOSOC substantive session was devoted to the role of the new technologies in development. The new information technologies do indeed represent a tremendous opportunity for freer and broader access to knowledge. But an equally tremendous challenge is the "digital divide", which means that, today, one American in four is a regular Internet user while only one African in a thousand is connected to the web.

We live in a global world, in which out economies are interdependent. That is a fact. The new challenges are global and require global responses. Whether those challenges are deepening inequality or the widening gap between rich and poor, the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, protecting the environment, gender equality or how to find lasting solutions to conflicts, there is a universally perceived need for greater solidarity, for regulating mechanisms and for more efficient and more democratic global governance. Mr. President, the world needs the United Nations as never before.

It is in terms of this conception of the United Nations' role in a world which is increasingly interdependent, and which we want to see more mutually supportive, that the European Union's support for operational development activities is to be seen.

Mr. President,

The European Union contributes substantially to funding UN development activities, providing over half the total resources.

Funding apart, the European Union has always been deeply involved in UN discussions on development issues and has supported reforms aimed at strengthening the cohesiveness, consistency and efficiency of the United Nations system in the field of development activities. The EU has accordingly given its full backing to implementation of the Secretary-General's reforms initiative to revitalize and improve the coordination of development activities. The strengthening of the system's coordination is crucial for its efficiency, credibility and impact on the ground. This will considerably improve the beneficiary countries' capacity to coordinate international aid and assume ownership of programs.

In the same way, in Fund and Programme Executive Boards, European Union Member States have consistently defended reforms designed to raise efficiency by improving management, focusing on areas of excellence, establishing results-oriented budgeting, and so on.

The European Union has also argued for stepping up the dialogue with Bretton Woods Institutions. From this point of view, the times are highly propitious and we should not let this opportunity slip. The formation of a new consensus in the international community through the organization in the 1990s of major UN conferences on sustainable human development ought to encourage us to cement the partnerships and strengthen the complementarity between the various institutions working in the field of international cooperation.

The European Union is also strongly committed to human rights. This issue is in all our minds at a time when the UNDP is publishing its annual report, devoted this year to the relationship between economic development and the promotion of human rights. The European Union has especially supported a rights-based approach in Funds and Programs, which was one of the main planks of the Secretary-General's 1997 reform.

We Europeans hold to a comprehensive, inclusive conception of development, which cannot be reduced to the mere satisfaction of material needs or the accumulation of wealth. The goal of development is wider, it is to foster the development of the fundamental rights of human beings, of access to health care, knowledge, employment and culture. The goal of development is also to protect the rights of future generations through sustainable development processes.

Development and the development of freedom are closely linked, as the Nobel Prize-winner for Economics and long-standing partner of the United Nations, Amartya Sen, argued in one of his best-known works "Development as Freedom". It is a vision shared by the signatories of the United Nations Charter, which, I need not remind you, begins with the words: "We the peoples of the United Nations determined … to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom …".

But if development and human rights are linked, so too are poverty and conflict inexorably bound, for poverty often begets strife. To further the economic and social development of populations is to work to prevent conflicts or for a return to lasting peace. This is why the European Union is convinced not only that the United Nations is fulfilling its rightful role in conducting development programs on the ground but that the UN is particularly well placed to ensure that action for development and action for peace and security - two sides of the same coin - are better meshed. Today it is vital that we stop the arbitrary practice of dissecting societies' histories, with the artificial distinctions between crisis prevention and crisis management, between emergency action and long-term development. It is time now to build bridges between these different activities in the interests of populations in need.

Mr. President,

As you know, the countries of the European Union make a substantial contribution to the international cooperation effort, since,accounting for less than one third of world GNP, they are providing more than the half of all ODA ( 54 %). Part of that aid is allocated through the European Community, which has become a leading actor in international cooperation. Each year the European Commission administers an overseas aid budget of EUR 8,55 billion (9 billion US dollars), a significant slice of which is implemented through United Nations agencies. The budget for the current Commission/UNDP project is estimated at EUR 122 million (128 million US dollars). We hope that we will see the United Nations and the European Community forging further links in the years ahead, for the greatest benefit of the peoples of the World, in particular of the peoples of the South.

Thank you Mr. President.

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