SECRETARY-GENERAL, IN UN DAY MESSAGE, CALLS FOR RENEWAL OF FAITH 'IN OUR ONE AND ONLY' UNIVERSAL INSTRUMENT OF PROGRESS
Press Release
SG/SM/6367
OBV/17
SECRETARY-GENERAL, IN UN DAY MESSAGE, CALLS FOR RENEWAL OF FAITH 'IN OUR ONE AND ONLY' UNIVERSAL INSTRUMENT OF PROGRESS
19971024 ADVANCE RELEASE Following is the text of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's message for United Nations Day, 24 October:On this fifty-second United Nations Day, I am honoured and very pleased to extend my warmest greetings to all the friends of the United Nations. In every corner of the world -- in every village and city and community -- the United Nations is a living testament of hope.
The United Nations lives in the heart and mind of every citizen striving to end violence and promote tolerance; advance development and ensure equality; protect human rights and alleviate poverty. The United Nations, at its best, enables the achievement of those highest of human aspirations.
The United Nations, at its best, is the United Nations that I believe our present reform efforts will create. A new era of promise and potential is transforming our environment, and we must transform our mission as well.
We can and we must be more responsive to the needs of peoples and Member States. We can and we must improve our work in development -- in advocacy and in the field. We can and we must be more effective in promoting human rights and good governance. We can and we must be swifter in responding to crises and preventing conflict.
We can and we must make the United Nations all that its peoples want it to be.
The United Nations for the next century will achieve this aim by re-imagining its promise and remaking its role.
It will seek out and develop new partnerships, with individual men and women, with non-governmental organizations, with the private sector and with peoples at large. It will ensure that no one is left behind and that no suffering is left unchallenged. It will succeed in its calling with the support and enthusiasm of the peoples of the United Nations or not at all.
- 2 - Press Release SG/SM/6367 OBV/17 20 October 1997
That is why I appeal on this United Nations Day to all friends and allies of the United Nations to renew their faith in our one and only universal instrument of progress.
Recommit yourselves to helping the United Nations help you make your societies more peaceful, more prosperous, more just and more promising. In all these areas, there is a new-found realization that global threats and opportunities alike require concerted action across borders and beyond traditional categories. They require the response of one world. Ours.
In return, we pledge ourselves to the achievement of a United Nations from which we all can gain, and in which we all can play a part in pursuit of a better future.
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