HEADQUARTERS PRESS BRIEFING BY SPECIAL ADVISER TO SECRETARY-GENERAL

HEADQUARTERS PRESS BRIEFING BY SPECIAL ADVISER TO SECRETARY-GENERAL

In a briefing at Headquarters today, Michael Doyle, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General, stressed that Member States of the United Nations, the private sector, non-governmental organizations and civil society were all responsible for achieving goals laid down in the Millenium Summit over the next 15 years.

Those goals, he said, ranged from peace and security and eradicating poverty to protecting the environment and promoting human rights and good governance.  He referred to a report released yesterday by the Secretary-General, which outlines progress in meeting each goal and concludes with strategies to enable Member States and the international community to move forward.  (For details of the Secretary-General’s report, see Press Release PI/1380.)

Each section of the report stresses crossing-cutting solutions to major global problems, said Mr. Doyle.  Preventing conflict was intimately tied to good governance, addressing development needs and poverty eradication.  Meeting the HIV/AIDS challenge was crucial in tackling the problems of poverty and development around the world.

Mr. Doyle noted that experts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the United Nations had all met to set up yardsticks which would help measure yearly progress in the Summit’s development goals.  Those included reducing the proportion of people in extreme poverty by half, expanding trade access, making debt more sustainable and increasing official development assistance (ODA).

In addition, the Secretary-General would report on the entire agenda of Millennium Summit goals each year.  Each report would be linked to a specific theme.

Asked whether the peace and security section of the report was relevant to the current terrorist crisis in the United States, Mr. Doyle noted that it urged the international community to ratify the 12 existing United Nations conventions against terrorism.

He also said that addressing the root causes of global problems was crucial in the long-term fight against terrorism.  That meant ensuring that the United Nations core agendas in development, peace, human rights, good governance and the environment were pushed forward.  Terrorist attacks would be less likely to recur in a global community where progress had been made in those vital areas.

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