Introduction
A major disaster befell the United Nations on 19
August 2003, when 15 United Nations staff members
and seven others were killed and well over 100
wounded in a bomb attack on our headquarters in
Baghdad. That disaster deprived the international
community of some of its most talented servants,
including the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was
serving as my Special Representative for Iraq. While
the full implications of the attack have yet to be
thought through, they clearly involve important issues
relating to the kind of mandates entrusted to the United
Nations by its Member States and our capacity to carry
them out.
The body of the present report was written before
that event, and it is in any case not a report on the
United Nations as such, but rather on the distance
travelled by humanity as a whole towards — or away
from — the objectives set for it by the world leaders
who met in New York in September 2000. Nonetheless,
I find it essential to begin by referring to the attack of
19 August, because I see it as a direct challenge to the
vision of global solidarity and collective security
rooted in the Charter of the United Nations and
articulated in the Millennium Declaration. Its
significance thus reaches beyond the tragedy that
affects us personally, as individuals, or even
institutionally, as an Organization.
Indeed, I see the attack as the latest in a series of
events that led me to give this report a different form
from that adopted last year. Even before the tragedy, I
felt that a simple progress report could hardly do
justice to what we had lived through in the last 12
months. In the area of peace and security, in particular,
the consensus expressed or implied in the Declaration
now looks less solid than it did three years ago. In the
area of development, by contrast, a stronger consensus
has been forged, but grave doubts remain as to whether
Member States are sufficiently determined to act on it.
And in the area of human rights and democracy there is
a danger that we may retreat from some of the
important gains made in the previous decade.
I think it necessary, therefore, under the three
above-mentioned headings, to evaluate not only the
progress made, or not made, but also the obstacles
encountered, and to re-examine some of the underlying
assumptions of the Declaration. We can no longer take
it for granted that our multilateral institutions are
strong enough to cope with all of the challenges facing
them. I suggest in my conclusion that some of the
institutions may be in need of radical reform.
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