YouSaid · the spoken record

Jorge Batlle Ibáñez

lines on the record: 23
first: 2001-09-24
most recent: 2004-09-24
sittings or episodes: 2
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

“In conclusion, Uruguay will continue to be committed to the international system and to the progressive development of international law, the most recent expression of which was the establishment of the International Criminal Court, whose Statute we have ratified. We reaffirm our conviction that multilateralism is the main principle on which the conduct of international affairs must be based. We express the hope that our region and the world as a whole will pool their efforts and work together in a realistic and committed manner. We continue to believe in the United Nations as the collective instrument best suited to our search for peace.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“We believe in freedom, but we believe also that freedom is indivisible: there can be no political freedom without economic freedom, and we think there can be no economic freedom that does not go hand in hand with political freedom. We believe, therefore, that peoples can be strong only if they can create their future in freedom. We cannot build and stabilize democracies if women and men cannot find an honest job to which to devote their energies. That goal cannot be achieved with economic assistance alone or with loans that, in the poorest countries, are paid back only with great difficulty. It can be brought about only with free trade ó something that the world experienced in the nineteenth century.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“This is particularly important since it is well known that States that vociferously preach free trade and demand open markets ó which in our case are already entirely open ó themselves impose and institute obstacles to trade, subsidize their production in distorting ways and compete with countries such as mine and many others, which have nothing to offer the world except the labour of their people in the commodity and industrial sectors, which further enriches the rich countries. Uruguay attaches fundamental importance to financial and trade issues. In all international forums, Uruguay calls for freer, more open markets. We favour a single market from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; we support the Doha Agreement; we support the opening of markets.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“We are in compliance with nearly all current treaties in this area, and our legislation improves our mechanisms for international cooperation against money laundering and the financing of terrorism. At the Millennium Summit and in the Doha Declaration and Monterrey Consensus we agreed on principles, goals and priorities, and we made commitments which we reaffirmed a few days ago at the summit of world leaders for the Action Against Hunger and Poverty. If we are to attain those goals, we need more just and equitable rules of international trade. That is how to ensure that this becomes a key stage in the march towards the social and political stability that is today in serious jeopardy.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Terrorism - and a genuine commitment to combat and defeat it - must therefore be the first item 10 on our international agenda. Each State, each nation, each community and each human being must contribute to this endeavour; that is how we can help the United Nations to fulfil its role as universal guarantor. Combating this and other evils - hunger, poverty, underdevelopment, marginalization, exclusion - requires a United Nations that is more united, nimbler and more effective. That is why the Organization must be more representative, more balanced and more reliable: so that it can continue to be a reference point for the weak and a restraining influence on the strong. Here, our country has recently adopted legislation strengthening the system of prevention and control of money laundering and the financing of terrorism.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Without autonomous, ready and independent means of coping with and transforming that state of affairs, the United Nations will not have solved anything at all even five, 10, 15 or 20 years from now. Yet only the United Nations can handle such tasks. Just more than three years since the fateful day of 11 September 2001 and just over six months since the tragedy in Madrid, new and terrible forms of violence continue assailing other parts of the world, claiming hundreds of innocent victims ó as we have recently seen in Russia and as we see in the Middle East. This reveals the destructive power that poses a permanent threat to the world as a whole, a source of inescapable sadness and a cause for despair about the human condition itself.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“That is the only way for the United Nations to succeed. A tiny nation like Haiti ó of 27,000 square kilometres and 9 million inhabitants, where the average number of children per mother is 4.7 and which lacks the institutional and material infrastructure it needs - cannot and will not resolve its problems merely because a contingent of military forces from countries of the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) is keeping the peace. Travelling in the Congo with the troops we recently dispatched, we see exactly the same thing happening: a nation of 2.2 million square kilometres and a population of 50 million does not have a road going from one end of the country to the other.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“We have participated in operations in Asia and in Africa, and we are currently deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Eritrea and elsewhere. Uruguay acknowledges and welcomes the wise European Union effort to bring equality at the highest level to European nations with marked differences in income compared with the richest countries. The examples of Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece, which will surely be emulated for new European Union members, indicate what we in the United Nations must do for the Congo and Haiti. There is no point in achieving peace if the United Nations lacks funds that can immediately be spent for the practical benefit of peoples in extreme economic difficulties. We must create global and largely autonomous financial instruments to achieve those goals.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Uruguay has been a Member of the United Nations since its foundation and believes in the Organization and in the varied multilateral agencies that support its efforts; we understand the need to consider Charter revision so that nations that did not then carry the weight they carry today can assume greater obligations in the inescapable tasks that the situation of mankind now imposes on us. It is time for them to share the responsibility with the five nations that assumed it nearly 60 years ago. Uruguay has also been participating in peacekeeping operations for many years. Uruguay is one of the largest troop contributors, and is the very largest if the ratio of its small population - 3.4 million - to peacekeepers is taken into consideration.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Furthermore, over the past 40 years, scientific advances and the ensuing technological applications have increased the resources of a very small group of nations, leaving far behind many other countries, some of which only recently gained their independence and most of which are rich in natural resources but lack the basic structures needed to achieve sustainable growth - countries, moreover, where, no doubt as a consequence of this, the population is increasing at very high rates and where the resulting emigration to other continents will soon create serious problems of coexistence.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Secondly, it is equally clear that the world has changed so much that the current reality now far exceeds the capacity of the institutions that were created to address and resolve past issues, issues that today have taken on totally different characteristics. Suffice it to recall that the founding Members of the United Nations numbered 51 and that today there are 191 Member States. More important, the worldís population at that time was only half what it is today. And the total is inexorably rising towards 9 billion.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“The question that we leaders ask ourselves ó especially 9 those of us who represent small nations - is whether this inexorable change can be handled by the organizations that we have created, or whether those organizations still have a long way to go in terms of adapting to the new reality. When we look at the impressive success achieved by the United Nations since San Francisco in 1944, two things seem clear. First, the institutions that we have created represent the greatest and most successful effort ever made by mankind to organize peaceful coexistence and to endow the planet with the best possible instruments for dealing with the important aspects of human lives within human society.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“Today no one denies that globalization is here and that it is here to stay. Not only has it changed the world of communications so that now everything happens at the same time throughout the world, but more importantly, it has made historical borders irrelevant. The young generation has more contact with other young people living thousands of miles away than they have with their own neighbours or family. It is absolutely true that a global culture is emerging in this world. While this is happening, countries are still living on their nationalisms, their secular habits, their own interests and their parochial projects that are often alien to the new realities.”
2004-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 59 (2004)
“What is worse, it destroys societies and paves the way for violence and, as we have often seen, even in our midst, all forms of terrorism. Finally, we consider it appropriate to repeat that we are far from holding the answer necessary for the world we have created. We might not have spoken aloud these thoughts that assuredly many of us have always had, had it not been for the thousands of innocent women and men that died on that ill-fated 11 September. We owe to them — whom Americans will always remember with love and grief, feelings we also share — our most important responsibility: to see to it that they did not die in vain. Their tragic fate has shown us our duty. Now it is time to do it.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“While loans are granted to us or fiscal or monetary adjustments are required of us, the doors to markets do not at the same time open to our products and our labour. This way, instead of participating in the process of globalization, we are closed in nearly sealed compartments. Those who have attained a certain level of growth grow even more, while the rest, save a few exceptions, suffer losses and fall further away from the levels that would make it possible to enjoy the necessary prosperity. Today the planet has 6 billion inhabitants. Only 1.1 billion of them live in developed areas. In 2050, not long from now — my grandchildren will not yet have reached my age — the planet will have 9.3 billion inhabitants, but still only 1.1 billion will live in developed areas. Poverty not only destroys democracy.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Uruguay, a small country, but one with a long international tradition — it was a participant in the 1907 Hague Conference to implement arbitration as the method for resolving conflicts, a member of the League of Nations and a founding Member of the United Nations in San Francisco — feels that this is our current situation, and we are ready to shoulder our due share of responsibility. In the past, we created international financial and monetary institutions, and others for international 20 trade, such as the World Trade Organization, which is meeting today in Doha. All these institutions govern our activities and determine what we must do. But they never act in concert. While the world is global, their decisions are sectoral or singular.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“We are living through an amazing revolution, and it must be guided — driving it forward if it stalls, limiting it if it goes too far — in order to achieve the goals enabling the structuring of a new, balanced international system that takes into account the changes that have occurred for humankind over the last 50 years. The United Nations was born as a response to a world that today no longer exists. The instruments and institutions it created in the past were a response to past realities — replaced today by new realities — in the political, demographic, cultural, religious and ecological spheres. All the many countries that make up this global society and that, together, navigate through space, have the obligation of confronting this new reality, drawing on our diversity.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Of my parents? And of the others, my neighbours, my friends? How will the simple acts of my life change? Will I be able to travel, receive letters, use transportation and cross bridges — without second thoughts, as was natural to us before? This world and, in particular, the United Nations face a challenge for which they are not duly prepared. We have created the technological and communication means to unify the planet and globalize it. But we neither know how nor have the proper instruments to properly manage this process.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Our task, then, is to galvanize everyone’s spirit in the struggle against terrorism, because terrorism not only fails to help solve the problems afflicting society as a whole but also fills it with fear and plunges it into paralysis and confusion. We move with ever greater determination towards a world and, consequently, towards a society that is evidently more and more globalized. The events of 11 September demonstrate that very clearly. Every people and every Government has been affected by those events. We are all involved in what happens, in a more profound way than ever, because what happened not only affects the security of the people; it raises questions that are much simpler, but the answers to which are complex: what are all of our lives going to be like from now on? What is the life of my family going to be like? Of my children?”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“Wicked because it indiscriminately destroys people and property and sows fear, anxiety and sometimes panic. Nevertheless, to fight it it will also be necessary to move against other enemies of peace, such as poverty and underdevelopment, to give every person good reason to live and to make all of us guardians of humankind, which is a common good from which no one must feel excluded, and for which we must fight unwaveringly. There is no cause or banner that could justify this violence. That is precisely why we must prevent marginalization, helplessness and desperation from taking root in people’s souls so that they look approvingly and complacently on the criminal actions of which we are victims.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“That commitment, undertaken with responsibility, involves taking every possible action without ever forgetting the higher goal: peace, whose supreme guarantee must continue to be international law and the conventions and treaties to which we are parties. But there is no doubt that such a commitment is not enough. We must fight every form of terrorism at every level, domestic and international, and on every front — legal, military, security and intelligence, administrative and management. This demands of us strong conviction, confidence in our shared values, faith in humankind and the affirmation of life as the highest value. Terrorism is blind and wicked by definition. Blind because it does not conceive or communicate goals shared by the rest and so plunges into irrationality.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“In short, this is a global phenomenon that demands of us a global answer and that has marked the start of the new millennium. The nations of my continent believe that to be so. The statements made by the Presidents of Brazil and of Mexico, which I endorse, made that perfectly clear. The Millennium Summit, which brought us together here last year, provided an opportunity for us to identify the issues that affect us all and that we must face as part of a challenge that no one can avoid. It 19 defined an agenda of peace and hope for a world affected by common problems, although, it must be said, in different ways. Today, we face a new scenario. Perhaps as never before, all of us, and hence the United Nations, have a common goal: to respond to terrorism, irrespective of boundaries, ideologies, religions, races and cultures.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)
“I want first of all to stress that, under the current circumstances, our presence — everybody’s presence — at this general debate unquestionably takes on special significance. Every year, the United Nations prepares and submits to Member States for their consideration a comprehensive agenda containing many items of varied scope and nature. This session is no exception: the United Nations will not stop. Yet, many things now appear completely different. The city of New York, the United States and every country, and the people of the United States and every people — all of humankind — have been cruelly attacked by terrorism, and its threat hangs over every one of us and over natural and peaceful relations among the peoples of the world.”
2001-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 56 (2001)