HIGHLIGHTS OF PRESS CONFERENCE BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY ON THE UPCOMING UN CONFERENCE ON THE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL CRISIS

Father Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, President of the United Nations General Assembly, briefed journalists in Geneva on the upcoming General Assembly Economic Crisis Summit, which will be held from 1 to 3 June 2009 in New York. He also responded to questions on Human Rights Council elections taking place in New York and on the situation of Mexico following the H1N1 flu outbreak. Paul Oquist, a Senior Adviser in the General Assembly President’s Office, also spoke.

United Nations Conference on International Financial and Economic Crisis

In opening remarks, Mr. d'Escoto said they were now in the last stretch of the preparatory work for a meeting at the highest level at the United Nations General Assembly concerning the financial and economic crisis and also its impact on development.

They had introduced the first draft of the outcome document. There had been many inputs that had had to be taken into consideration. First, there was the work of the Presidential Commission of Experts that he had started six months ago, working under the coordination of Professor Joseph Stiglitz. That Commission had had five meetings. There had also been input from different specialized agencies of the United Nations; from heads of State and foreign ministers that he had met on trips around the world in the past few months to gather ideas; from civil society, which had been very much involved in sending their ideas; and input from the States Members of the United Nations themselves.

In terms of criticism, Mr. d'Escoto pointed to “a coming together of the representatives of the European Union against the outcome document”. He had not heard their criticisms of the content; they had reportedly centred on procedures, accusing him of not taking into account the work done by the facilitators, particularly the Dutch facilitator. However, Mr. d'Escoto said he disagreed and was very much encouraged by the wholehearted support he had received here in Geneva from the specialized agencies, in particular World Trade Organization (WTO) head Pascal Lamy and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Chief. “Their reaction was very positive to the document, saying the document reflects the issues accurately and that the proposals are good”. He was expecting to get some more language from those agencies today to improve the document. He also confirmed that both the Secretary-General of UNCTAD and the Director-General of WTO would be participating at the meeting, and the ILO would be participating at the round table in June.

Paul Oquist, a Senior Adviser in the General Assembly President’s Office, said the President’s mission was to encourage Heads of State and government to personally attend the meeting and to get feedback on the draft outcome document presented. The 1 to 3 June Conference would endorse political lines of action and express political will for lines of action. In the succeeding months there would be work by technical and ministerial working groups to formulate proposals based on those lines of action. It would be a process that would last through September 2010. In the meantime, different proposals could be rolled out, the first period for doing so being the first fortnight of September 2009

Procedural problems facing Upcoming Summit

In reply to a question on whether it was surprising that the upcoming conference was facing procedural problems, given the trouble the Human Rights Council had faced when it had wanted to hold a special session on the same subject, Mr. D’Escoto said he had referred to the fact that the Europeans had always been against the conference. They had tried to scuttle it from the beginning in Doha. Then they tried to postpone it to a time when he would no longer be the president of the General Assembly. Now they were complaining of procedural matters, to do the same thing, saying that he had not adequately consulted the facilitators. But that was only one of the inputs, not all of them, he stressed. In the final analysis he was trying to have the final document reflect all the positions. They were all in the same boat. So he was looking for proposals that would bring them together.

“The third world cannot continue to subsidise the first world”, Mr. D’Escoto emphasized. The third world had always been characterised as the beggars and the first world as the benefactors, “but when they want a war that they cannot finance they begin printing money, with no back up, and poor countries like mine with reserves in dollars are losing their reserves”. Printing money without support had meant the dollar had gone down. That could no longer be the currency for reserves. All of these issues had to be discussed.

The Europeans said that that meeting was only to deal with the impact of the financial crisis on developing countries. But the meeting was on the economic and financial crisis as well as the impact on development. That included looking at the systemic problems and finding a new model. If they didn’t they would have the same problems all over again.

The G-20 had a right to be happy with the results they had reached at their summit, “not that I know what those are”, Mr. D’Escoto commented. But what about the G-192? This was the twenty-first century, a century of democratic inclusiveness. They all had to participate in responding to the problems they were facing.

Human Rights Council Elections

Asked about the Human Rights Council elections in New York, and criticisms about the non-democratic members involved in the process, Mr. D’Escoto did not wish to comment.

“Democracy could not be built on lies and not letting the people know what was being done with their money.” So Mr. D’Escoto would soft pedal a bit this idea of whether or not certain countries were democracies or not. What was important was the commitment to move towards democracy. It was always to be perfected. It did not help democratization to have some of the worst culprits try to pretend that they were the teachers, he noted.

H1N1 flu / Impact on Mexico

Regarding the impact on the Mexican economy of the H1N1 flu outbreak, and in particular asked to comment on the fact that countries in the region had imposed measures such as flight restrictions, Mr. D’Escoto said the situation they were seeing in Mexico was very regrettable indeed. What he had been reading in Spain was that everything had been exaggerated and brought up to a scandalous level so as to damage their Mexican brothers and sisters and the Government was doing what it could to address the situation. He had made an appeal at a Non-Aligned Movement meeting for greater solidarity with Mexico. Moreover, it would appear that the situation was not at all as serious as it might have seemed at the beginning.

Addressing the issue of uneven impacts on particular economies, Mr. Oquist noted that the draft final document for the upcoming high-level conference contained a proposal for a global stimulus package. National stimulus plans were protectionism pure and simple. If a developed country subsidised its banks and financial industries to a tune of several billion that meant developing countries could simply not compete. It created an uneven playing field.