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Assembly President calls for international relations to reflect key principles

Assembly President calls for international relations to reflect key principles

A new culture of international relations based on the principles of full respect for human rights, human security, the responsibility to protect and the promotion of sustainable development is necessary, General Assembly President Srgjan Kerim said today.

Speaking to reporters about the work so far of the sixty-second session of the 192-member Assembly, Mr. Kerim said those principles should drive discussions about all the key issues faced by the international community.

“The world needs more software than hardware in dealing with each other,” Mr. Kerim said, stressing the importance of the values enshrined in the United Nations Charter.

“This new culture of international relations should be based on full respect of human rights, human security, the responsibility to protect and sustainable development. All this issues are intertwined, interrelated.”

The priority issues for the Assembly this session remain climate change, financing for development, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), counter-terrorism and UN reform, he said.

Since it began in September the session had been generally conducted in “a spirit of good cooperation, good faith and constructive dialogue.”

Next month’s UN-led negotiations in Bali, Indonesia, on devising a successor pact to the Kyoto Protocol on emissions reduction will be decisive in determining further progress on the issue, the President stressed, adding that the Assembly was planning to hold a series of follow-up meetings and activities in a bid to spur more progress.

Mr. Kerim also highlighted a series of events taking place during this session, including: a joint event next week with the Inter-Parliamentary Union on reinforcing the rule of law in international relations; a high-level meeting next month on children; and a separate high-level meeting on the HIV/AIDS pandemic and its impact on the attainment of the MDGs, the ambitious set of goals for reducing poverty and other social ills, all by 2015.