YouSaid · the spoken record

Juli Minoves-Triquell

lines on the record: 68
first: 2000-09-24
most recent: 2005-09-24
sittings or episodes: 4
sources: un-general-debate

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We also give our support to the creation of a Council of Human Rights, and we will follow closely the progress made on a new convention in the struggle against terrorism. The United Nations represents a legacy from a period of conflict which culminated in the Second World War, the Cold War, and the nuclear stalemate that followed. While we recognize its imperfections, we must not forget to acknowledge the wisdom of its guiding principles: peace between all nations, universal human rights, and the development of states. We live in a time when the power of a single nation is fast becoming an historical illusion. Let us work towards a new enlightenment, the unity of the United Nations. It is time to work together for the United Nations.”
2005-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 60 (2005)
“Our stable relations with our neighbours, Andorra’s tradition as a safe haven during European wars and conflicts, our parliamentary tradition that stretches back to 1419 and our geopolitical realities, all make us believe in and defend the virtues and values of dialogue, pacifism and development, which are at one with those of the United Nations. In twelve years of international life, my country has adopted some 130 international conventions and has stated its firm belief in international law, as in the creation of the International Criminal Court. We will continue in this task, reaffirming our commitment to multilateralism, and by sending to Parliament for ratification the conventions on terrorism and human rights.”
2005-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 60 (2005)
“In part, the answer seems to lie in the potential for rebalancing the global economy, but it also requires a reawakening of those dulled sensibilities that separate rich from poor, the advantaged from the disadvantaged, the free from the oppressed. The Millennium Declaration was a necessary step forward, and the current tensions over reform should not distract this body from its ultimate mission. Whether we are speeding towards challenges that will take the form of natural or man-made catastrophes, we can be assured that their effects will no longer be contained within national borders. We must prepare to respond to them with a strength and resolve that also knows no bounds. Before, I spoke of a small country, the Netherlands, and of its history. Andorra is also a small country that believes in tolerance and respect for our fellow man.”
2005-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 60 (2005)
“We have to face them with real development policies coupled with good governance and a just system for trade and dialogue. The Millennium Development Goals are our collective responsibility. The legacy of the Renaissance nation State remains a powerful concept. Our love for our respective countries and all that this represents to us is a defining aspect of our identities. So how is it possible to overcome the fundamental paradox of this Organization — to link the pride of our national statehood, which is the source of our material, cultural and ethnic differences, to the idea of unity, of being “united”.”
2005-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 60 (2005)
“I would rather hope that we will see a new sense of 22 human values, a recognition that we are united not only by our presence in a shrinking world but as members of the human race. We are fully aware that even as this explosion in technology seems to link all countries in the embrace of a globalized media culture, it feeds old parochialisms, nationalism and ethnic strife. The gap between rich and poor, the have and have-not countries, seems ever wider, even as our interconnectedness grows in trade and in labour. But with visions of first-world excess beamed into every comer of the globe, can anyone be surprised that anger towards the West increases? Poverty, discrimination, war, hunger and disease — this is the daily lot for a great part of humanity. We see the images every day. We cannot ignore nor can we fear these realities.”
2005-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 60 (2005)
“On the one hand, we have reason to hope that the problems facing the world can be solved by technology; on the other hand, technology has contributed to the rise of extremism and provided the means to unleash violence of hitherto unknown proportions. The radical enlightenment, which first began in the Netherlands, a small country but one known for its tolerance and liberty of creative thought, offered new solutions to the turmoil and sectarian violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It developed a mode of critique that could be separated from religious truth, and, for the first time in the history of the West, a fully modern ethical system. What forms might a radical twenty-first century enlightenment take?”
2005-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 60 (2005)
“Let us reflect for a moment about the effects of those changes and what we might learn from them. The printing press fostered a rapid exchange of information that was readily available to large numbers of people and could not be censored or controlled, although some institutions tried very hard to enact such controls. Out of this explosion of information came the glory of a scientific revolution but also the sixteenth-century wars of religion and Europe’s first world war, the Thirty Years War of the first half of the seventeenth century. The promise of eventual mastery over the natural world was coupled with violent attempts to dominate the minds and souls of man. In many ways, our own information revolution has had a similar effect on developments.”
2005-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 60 (2005)
“Natural disasters have become magnified not only by increases in population, but by the growing dangers of environmental pollution. Sixty years after the founding of the United Nations, we live in a faster world, where we have to be able to react to events almost immediately. We have to ensure that even with the feeling of heightened risk that we live with at the beginning of the twenty-first century — whether this be due to natural phenomena, advances in technology, the threat of terrorism or the frittering away of resources — our will to act is not in any way diminished. The bar is set very high, but our capacity to act together as a whole can be just as great. Another period of technological innovation also affected dramatic changes in the speed and mode of communication - the printing press.”
2005-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 60 (2005)
“At the beginning of the third millennium, faster means of travel that began in the nineteenth century with railroad technology are today hurtling us around the globe at even faster speeds. Dramatic changes are taking place at all levels and in all modes of communication. From the train, to the automobile and to the airplane, even in space travel, speed is erasing spatial barriers. The telegraph, the telephone, the Internet, cell phones, video conferencing: speed is altering the way we communicate with one another. In this new age, immensely significant developments can take place as more quickly than the mind can follow them. But as the philosopher Paul Virillio warns us, with every new technology comes the potential for a new accident and with increasing speed comes the threat of ever more horrendous catastrophes.”
2005-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 60 (2005)
“We must recognize the power of our vulnerability, for in this recognition, we recover our strength, our vision of a common future and the will to act together. It is together that we will win the war against terrorism.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“Only in the cold world of abstraction does that attack symbolize anything beyond untold suffering. We need to pull violence back from abstraction into the world of human conversation. If people feel excluded from the future, their alienation gives them a mad and violent certainty. We must get to work to rebuild an inclusive and tolerant idea of the future, an idea that is all too easily forgotten in war, an idea of the future in which everybody is protected from those who would destroy it, an idea of the future so strong that it includes those people who might otherwise be tempted by the madness of playing God. That future is premised on awareness, not of the strength of the nuclear nations or of powerful economies, but of the vulnerability of this compact and of individual nations large and small.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“In the wake of 11 September we recognize both the need for the rule of law and the cause of that need: the vulnerability of all people to malevolent attack. The motto of Andorra is Virtus Unita Fortior, which can be loosely translated as “United We Stand”. That is not simply an appeal to patriotism or for a common front against the enemy. It is a recognition that together people are stronger, because alone we are weak and vulnerable. Nothing can justify the attack of 11 September 2001. It is nevertheless important, here in the General Assembly, to consider the roots of violence. The terrorists turned their anger and alienation — political, cultural, economic and personal — into an abstract act of inhuman cruelty whose “solution” was the attack on the towers.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“They are without a country and pose a particular danger and challenge. In that sense, we must embark on an aggressive reaching out to all people, an aggressive assertion of our common humanity. That might well be a media campaign, although it needs to come directly from all elected politicians and ministers. We are not trying to abstract issues or win a war of words. We need to pull everybody into the human compact. We need to recognize our individual vulnerability. It was America's belief in its invulnerability that was so profoundly shaken by the terrorist attack. Yet if the sudden collapse of the towers and the fear and chaos of that day revealed a weakness, it also revealed strength: the strength of its citizens' resolve and the profound sympathy of all the peoples of the world.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“Our first and strongest line of defence against violence is the rule of law, with diplomacy to enact it. The United States, founded on the rule of law and on rights for all, understands that. Andorra understands that, because without law we would not have survived as a country for nearly a millennium. That is why Andorra believes in and supports international law and trusts the United Nations, particularly its democratic members, to lead the world from its history of violence towards its common future. In relation to Iraq, Andorra supports the role of the United Nations, and we shall follow carefully the debates in the Security Council. Terrorism is not a conventional war: there can be no treaties, no compacts, with terrorists. Law is vital for all countries, but terrorists do not care about laws.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“In a way, I think, at least for the moment and perhaps necessarily, the terrorist attack on the future has damaged it. It demanded a strong response: the mission in Afghanistan, the continued destruction of Al Qaeda. That is the kind of response that the perpetrators of that violence would understand; a response that cannot be seen as a sign of weakness or vulnerability. It is a logical, and therefore necessary, response that the terrorists themselves unleashed. But violence breeds violence, and the future of violence is simple destruction: nothing — and nothing will come of nothing. We run the risk of entering an endless war against a shadowy enemy; a war that, given the nature of the enemy, might prove very hard to win completely. And yet it must be won.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“Indeed, it seems that the terrorists longed for purity, for a pure vision of the future in which the tolerance — the impurities — of New York would have no place. They believed, but not in the uncertain future of New York, the restless striving for the new. They believed that with their deaths they would enter paradise of the afterlife. They believed, sacrilegiously, that they were the means of God's providence. When the terrorists attacked America, they also attacked the future. They attacked the future of tolerance, a future controlled not by fate, but by 25 mankind. We cannot let our notion of the future fall with the towers, for the future is as fragile as the towers proved to be, perhaps more so. The future is built not of steel and stone, but of law and human sympathy.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“The city was not, nor is it, spoiled by revenge. New York always looks to the future. While others may reproach the city for its indifference to its past, its forward-looking optimism is perhaps its greatest gift to the world. So when we all saw in Andorra and elsewhere the attacks on the World Trade Center, my first response was that the suicide hijackers did not know New York. They did not know that this city has brought people from all countries together. They did not know the people who would die in the collapse of the towers: people from many of the religions and countries of the world. But then I realized that perhaps they did know, that perhaps New York was their target, and that their target was the future. Or rather, their target was a future of tolerance: religious, cultural, personal.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“Out of the ruins of the Second World War, the nations of the world joined to create a better future for all humanity. The belief that binds us together is the belief that together, only together, we can build a better world for all: a glorious city on the hill; a new Jerusalem; a Jerusalem of all religions, all beliefs; a city of tolerance; a city very much like New York. That is why, I think, the terrorist attacks were so painful, for New York City is very much an expression of the United Nations, a place for all of the citizens of the world, all religions and all beliefs — the city of tolerance; a city that resolutely looks forward to the future; New York: city of dreams, city of the future. Strangely, even as New York was profoundly wounded by these attacks, no other city, I think, has been so resolute in looking forward.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“They had to consider, to think, to attack fortune; to hurl the slings and shoot the arrows back at her, if you will. In this shift, from passive object to active agent, the idea of the future begins its transformation. In this future, Machievelli's heirs — diplomats gathered here today — advise the modern princes, the democratically elected rulers of the world, for the general good of the people. The future becomes an idea that we build through strategy, thought and action, through laws and treaties we enter into and must obey. That is the very purpose of the United Nations, the great parliament of the world's Governments, or in a less poetic but more apt image, a great, international factory, in that it builds the future: a future, not for the wealthy or the powerful, not for some nations, but for the world and its peoples.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“But gradually we drew away from this passive enslavement to our fate, our destiny, and we struggled to master the future. The change in the future is first heard in the writings of that first theorist of diplomacy, the cunning Machiavelli. In The Prince, he wrote that a ruler must learn to profit from chance, or rather turn chance to his favour. In a typically violent metaphor, he tells the Prince that Fortune must be beaten. Machiavelli counsels him to wrestle with fortune and thereby create the future. Although Machiavelli was advising an absolute monarch, and indeed his thought presaged a long period of monarchical absolutism, he understood that the rulers and the administrators could no longer afford to be passive objects of history.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
““There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” Hamlet tells Laertes in Shakespeare's great play. But alongside this Christian understanding of God's providence is another figure, the pagan figure of Fortuna, who holds her wheel on which all men, king and commoner, rise and fall. Hamlet is also aware of her power; he is buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune, and he longs to end his life, but he fears God's prohibition against suicide. This very prohibition, shared by all three of the great religions of the West, was broken by the suicide attacks of 11 September. So, too, the prohibition that “thou shall not kill”. Life is precious: it is given to us, and we cannot take it away. In these two models of the future, humanity is passive. We are puppets — God or Fortune pulls our strings.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“And yet what we do know is how actively to seek peace, and thereby ensure our future. It is about the future, the idea of the future, that I wish to speak today. The future. In order to understand it, we must look not only to those events that are determining it, that are forming it even as we speak, but also to its own history as an idea. What is the history of the future? 24 Here I will only invoke, in passing, two earlier models that 500 years ago embodied our understanding of the future: God's providence and the wheel of Fortune. In the providential model of the future, God looks down on the full history of the world from “the high citadel of eternity” in the words of Thomas Aquinas. He sees everything, every grain of sand, every sparrow that falls.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“And yet we are not safe from the storms that buffet the world. Because of our small size, our reliance on trade and our relations with our neighbours and the world — our diplomacy, if you will — are of the greatest importance to our well-being. As we turn to the world, so, too, the world turns to us in the tens of millions of tourists that visit us every year. Our industries, our citizens and our lives are as intimately linked to the world as to the mountains that surround us. This link was clear in the profound sadness of our people over the loss of life in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. We felt it as a visceral blow, a spontaneous expression of true sympathy. The world surrounds us, although we often feel we can do little to influence the course of events.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“In New York, and in the world, the catastrophe of the attacks of 11 September seems so present with us that we feel its imprint still upon us, as if our souls were marked by the fall of the towers and the cruel loss of life. We feel this past as a tangible, palpable weight, and we also sense the future pressing in upon us. This past year, we have witnessed the war in Afghanistan, the fall of the Taliban and the establishment of a new Government in Kabul. Will there be intervention in Iraq, will there be more attacks in America, in Europe, or elsewhere? What will the future bring? I ask these questions as Foreign Minister of the Principality of Andorra. Andorra is a small and peaceful country nestled in the protected valleys of the Pyrenees. We have lived in peace for nearly a thousand years.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“First of all, may I congratulate President Jan Kavan, well known for his expertise in human rights, on his election to preside over this General Assembly. My congratulations also go to the outgoing President, Mr. Han Seung-soo, for his hard work, and I commend the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, whose stewardship of the Organization in these trying times is particularly admirable. I also congratulate Switzerland on its admission to membership in the Organization. This session of the General Assembly, more than in recent years, seems caught between the past and the future — a tragic past, an uncertain future.”
2002-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 57 (2002)
“Blindness, rather than insight, is the curse of the ideologue, of people who do not want to see outside their own skins, their ideas or their place. It is the curse of people who do not want to see the world in its marvellous diversity, its uncertainty and its possibilities. To see this world, we have only to look around us here, now. We have only to wander through the streets of this miraculous city of New York.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“It seems to me that there is tragic confusion between globalization and abstract and oppressive technology. It is this notion of modernity that seems to be at the heart of the recent protests against globalization, protests that would have been the focus of our debates before 11 September. While the protesters have many valid points to make, and they need to be listened to, globalization and modernity are not the problem. Whether cooperation between nations is economic, political or cultural, it is not a threat. Leaders and intellectuals need to reach out and embrace the limits of knowledge. They must speak out against dogmatism to unravel facile notions of monolithic governments or global compacts. An eye for an eye, that harsh principle from the Old Testament, will soon leave us blind.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“What I am proposing is certainly not propaganda; rather, it is a worldwide debate on the importance of debate, in which human scepticism, a recognition of the limits of belief, is very much at stake. Whether this argument can be made in an urgent and anti-elitist way is very much the point. But unless we are able to recognize modernity as a liberating experience, independent of its accumulation of goods and services, creature comforts, and the like, I have little hope for a positive resolution to the crisis we now face. Modernity is a work in process. One name for modernity, as it exists for us today, is globalization. This is the creation of a “world culture”, the entry of technology into every aspect of our lives, the omnipresence of the media and the increasing speed by which culture and information are communicated.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Modernity’s belief in democracy as a means to popular expression has never proved more vital. Secondly, outside of Islam, a return to humanism lies at the heart of the modernity in which we are living. To recognize modernity and its great contribution, a secular and universal culture — mass culture — is something that needs to be protected and fought for. It is a modernity that insists on the rights of men, women and children. We all know that words often do not lead to action. But we forget that words, the expression of ideas and of criticism, are a vital form of action. We cannot be simplistic in our desire for a direct relationship between debate and resolution.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“The danger always exists that education can harden from humanistic scepticism into the rock of dogma. What is to be done? Today I propose an urgent return to a new humanism on two fronts: first, within Islam, a humanism among Muslims — politicians, 31 writers, readers — that can dampen sectarian violence and that can reach out to religious extremism to find common ground. This can only come from within the Islamic world. It does not have to be secular in nature, although secularism has an important yet increasingly threatened status within certain nations. Correspondingly, there must be recognition within political regimes everywhere that antipathy to political dissent politicizes religion and creates more problems for these regimes than it solves.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“So, too, is the misrepresentation of the poor by certain writers and intellectuals — I need not name names — who claim to speak for them. The suffering sown in Afghanistan by decades of invasion and civil war, they argue, has brought terrorism as its terrible harvest. In fact, these poor want most of all to live, and to live well. They embrace modernity and its comforts. But violence, the ability to treat other people as objects, as things to be crushed and destroyed: this is a gift bestowed by education. The struggle is therefore ideological. This is why education, the greatest gift, was a passport to terrorism for these men. The risk of education in this context is that the pressure of knowledge, or more precisely a recognition of uncertainties and of the limits of knowledge, will tempt the student into dogmatic belief.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Yet, when we examine the lives of the 11 September terrorists, we realize first that they were not Afghans, and second, that they were not the wretched of the earth. They were from the middle class. Most were students, some with advanced degrees. They never even had to work hard for a living, like most members of the middle class. These men were privileged murderers. Or let me put it another way: they were fully modern. The struggle between modernity and the anti- modern is not anachronistic. To be a terrorist demands that you enter, systematically and rationally, into the modern world and to turn its apparatus, such as transportation and communication, against it. The struggle against modernity is one of the most romantic myths generated by modernity itself.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Modern scientific understanding ushered in the industrial revolutions, the astonishing explosion of the middle class, of print culture and of the establishment of modern democracies. It introduced all of these “world-historical” events, to use Hegel’s term that we call, rather sloppily, “modernity.” I conclude my intervention on the subject of modernity, because many commentators on the current war in Afghanistan see the war framed as a war between the Taliban, as Islamic extremists, and modernity. They cite the way in which the Taliban have banned all forms of mass media culture and have insisted on a literal application of sharia law. They argue that the Taliban are anti-modern and that their regime is trying to return its people to an earlier, pre- modern way of life.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“To think and write as Montaigne did — that is, to insist on the limits of knowledge, and to speak not in a universal but in a personal voice — was a great step forward for humankind. In turning knowledge away from religious certainty, the humanists allowed for a new field of understanding that we now call the sciences. While inquisitions would carry on for a century — Galileo was a boy when Montaigne was writing — the scepticism that Montaigne advanced against religious violence in 1580 is the same as that which Boyle, Newton, or Lavoisier would apply to the universal truths of natural theology in order to create a way of understanding that we now recognize as scientific.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“At a time of religious extremism, when Catholics and Protestants were fighting over the keys to heaven — just as the 11 September terrorists died believing they would enter paradise — Montaigne wrote about the limits of knowledge. And he wrote about a personal experience, this accident, with which everybody, even now, can empathize. This is why he is called a humanist, because of his genuine interest in human experience. There is no revealed truth in Montaigne, no dogmatism, only human scepticism that appears as an antidote — the only antidote — to the certainty of madmen who would kill for belief. This evolution in human thought was accomplished without sacrificing the freedom to believe, to have faith in God and to practice a religion.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Out of these wars of religion and out of the 30 bloody struggles of the Reformation came a powerful antidote to religious violence that we call humanism. The great French humanist Michel de Montaigne was a sceptic. He wrote about the limits to human knowledge in his remarkable Essays. In one of them, entitled “Of Practice,” he observed that, although we can practice for many things in life, there is one thing for which we cannot practice, one thing we cannot know, and that is our own death. He went on to describe the closest he came to knowing death, an accident that happened when he fell from his horse. He had been out riding in a militia and was nearly crushed to death. He had a brief sensation of his soul hovering over his body, and, later, after being taken home, terrible pain continued to plague him.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“The old rhetoric of the Crusades, such as the loss of Al-Andalus — Andalusia — in 1492 and other battles from history are being invoked by the terrorists to inflame the feelings of Muslims throughout the world and to bring about a fundamentalist pan-Islamic entity. This is a delicate issue but we must face it head-on. This crisis can be contained only if we speak bluntly and rationally. The terrorist networks invoke history — the history of religious war — to inflame sentiment. Their invocation of history, however, may be a tactical error. For history can be our ally in the battle against terrorism and violence. I beg your pardon, but let us return to an earlier point in history, a bloody time of religious crisis in Europe — and I am speaking about the wars of religion that decimated sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“The international community has for decades sought a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but a solution, if one is to be found, must come first and foremost from within Israel and Palestine. Their peace, if it is to be reached, cannot be imposed from without. While these are the proclaimed reasons for the hostility of the terrorist networks to the United States, one might come to the conclusion that these stated objectives are a screen, and that the attacks were made in order to bring about religious wars in the twenty- first century. For the United States and its allies, it is a war against terrorism. But the terrorist networks claim it is a religious war, pitting Christianity against Islam.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Let me assert Andorra’s belief in the role of debate rather than violence as a necessary response to violence — its belief that the United Nations is a vital forum for world conversation, a forum whose principles, and indeed whose buildings, need to be celebrated and protected. Let us therefore ask ourselves what it is these terrorists want. In the videotape he released the day the American bombing began, their leader announced the following goals: first, the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia; secondly, an end to the bombing of Iraq; and, finally, a resolution of the Palestinian problem. It is worthwhile to note that both the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia and the bombing of Iraq are the direct result of prior aggression.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Through the centuries, we have welcomed scores of refugees from European wars persecuted in their homelands for their ideas. Our Constitution, which enshrines the secularity of the State, includes a far-reaching bill of rights that highlights democracy and the rule of law. Let me therefore reaffirm, as our President, Marc Forné, stated immediately after the attacks, Andorra’s condemnation of these crimes. My country has taken appropriate measures to combat terrorism in all its forms, and I will be signing the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Conventions of the Council of Europe against terrorism and corruption.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“If there are disagreements and disputes, we should never forget that the very act of debate — the very idea of this forum — is anathema to those whose modus operandi is silence. What is telling, in my opinion, is not the identity of the perpetrator — we are quite certain who is responsible, although we have only begun to consider why — but the fact that the perpetrators, dead and alive, never admitted responsibility for their actions. I would thus like to express the views of my country, the Principality of Andorra, in this debate. Andorra is a small country created in 1278 by a pact of peace, and is blessed with seven centuries of peace and a parliamentary system that started in 1419. We Andorrans like to think of our country as an example of tolerance and coexistence of different creeds and nationalities.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“29 We know that this very building might have been a target for the terrorists, and that in an earlier terrorist attack of 1993, the United Nations was on the list. This seems to me proof, if any is needed, that the United States of America is not the only object of terrorism. Rather, it is the idea of tolerance and religious and cultural diversity, symbolized both by New York City and by the United Nations, that is the object of the rage of a small group of men — men who live and die by terror and who have turned away from political debate to violence and death. And so all of us here must play our part in the battle against mindless killing, and debate both the reasons for and the responses to terrorism.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“We meet today almost two months after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. The horror of this attack, the thousands dead: so many terrible images have been seared into our collective memory. And we remember also the remarkable acts of courage and determination that followed in the wake of this shameful crime. That the attack took place here, in New York, the seat of the United Nations, is both painful and sad. For New York is an immigrant’s city that welcomes with open arms all races and all creeds from our world. The list of the victims of the attack, from so many different countries, attests to the remarkable and joyous diversity that makes New York. She is truly the capital of the world, and the right place, the only place, for its United Nations.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Allow me at the outset to congratulate Mr. Han Seung-soo on his election to the presidency of the Assembly and to express our thanks to his predecessor, Mr. Harri Holkeri. I would also like to congratulate the Secretary- General, Kofi Annan, and the United Nations on their well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize. We are compelled to take up the events of 11 September and the actions initiated by our Organization, starting with Security Council resolution 1373 (2001), at our discussions here today. I have chosen to make my statement in a language not of my country — English, the language of our host country and city — in tribute to the United States, to the American people and Government and to New York City, which were harmed by the recent terrorist attacks.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“And let us hope that they see us as an image of positive change. We who have lived through such change cannot turn away from it. With our feet on the ground of this great globe of ours, we need to look forward. We need to grasp change. We need to reach out.”
2000-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 55 (2000)
“So too, the great global threat of AIDS and other infectious diseases demands a response from each nation and a recognition that these threats can never be adequately dealt with alone, but only by working globally through the United Nations. In short, we need not only the United Nations, but, as many have said, we need united nations. 19 I began this speech with the image of my great- grandmother looking down at the stony ground of her country. I would end it, symbolically at least, with another image: our image. Someday, our great- grandchildren may discover our image, perhaps even our image here in this place. Perhaps they will reproduce it through a technology so strange, so remarkable, we cannot even imagine it. But let us hope that they live in the brave new world I have spoken of today.”
2000-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 55 (2000)
“The International Criminal Court, whose statute will soon be ratified by Andorra, a country which had the honour of contributing to it by composing the first paragraphs of the preamble, is a good example of an entity that respects borders but that places human rights above all. Crimes against humanity must be punished, and shall be. This new nationalism, while it recognizes borders, asserts that the rights of citizens to liberty and peace are primary. Hence, the United Nations, even as it respects national borders, needs to recognize that it can and should become proactive in the protection of those rights in the case of civil conflict.”
2000-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 55 (2000)
“In this sense, Andorra's quiet patriotism, its 700 years of peace and communication, can modestly serve as a kind of historical model. Countries need to rethink what it means to be a nation in order to participate effectively in the life of this our globe, in order to become what we must be and to a certain extent already are: united nations. In its very name, in its very mission, the United Nations anticipated the globalization that is so rapidly occurring. Born out of a global threat posed by war and later by nuclear war, forged from the most terrible of national struggles, the United Nations is an activist forum for issues that are global, not in the sense that they transcend any individual nation, but in the sense that they are of concern to all nations.”
2000-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 55 (2000)
“We need a democratic nationalism forged out of a concern for the rights of individuals. That is not nationalism as it worked out from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries — a nationalism linked to the struggle to control markets, to the scramble for loot — but a new nationalism that is not predicated on identity, on cultural sameness, a nationalism that is linked to a world economy that is no longer restricted by national borders, a democratic or civic nationalism, a global nationalism. This would be a new nationalism, I must add, in which Andorra and other small countries are not historical anachronisms, but are emblematic of this civic nationalism, predicated as it must be on the democratic will of the people.”
2000-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 55 (2000)
“Are globalization and nationalism opposed? On the surface, they would appear to be. So much of globalization — economies that transcend borders, communication networks that shrink the world — seems to render an earlier model of the nation-State obsolete. And yet, whether it be the ethnic conflicts in Rwanda or in the Balkans, issues of immigration in the developed world or conflict in East Timor, we know that the question of the border, of the passport, remains increasingly important. Despite our interconnectedness, nationalism has not withered away. I fear the rise of a nationalism no longer linked to true patriotism, that is to the love of a place. I pray that the world does not succumb to an unthinking nationalism that would exist simply to exclude or to feed the ambitions of unscrupulous politicians.”
2000-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 55 (2000)