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Agenda Item 52 - Strengthening of the United Nations system

Introductory remarks by H. E. Mr. Jan Kavan, President of the Fifty-seventh session of the United Nations General Assembly
12 November 2002

Today we will continue our consideration of the report of the Secretary-General entitled "Strengthening of the United Nations: an agenda for further change" (document A/57/387 and Corrigendum1).

Before doing so, let me briefly inform you about the time-frame of the process of our further deliberations on this matter.

Next informal consultations of the plenary on this item will be held on Thursday afternoon 14 November, to consider the remaining actions 21 - 24 (Section V - allocating resources to priorities). Thus, we will conclude the "clarification phase" of the process of our consideration of the UN reform.

At the end of this week, taking into account all your comments and suggestions made during the debate, as well as during the four informal consultations we will have had by Thursday, 14 November, on this Agenda Item, the Vice-President and I will draft a non-paper, which will be circulated to you on 21 November 2002. Let me reassure you, that each delegation is welcomed to contact me, the Vice-president or the facilitators directly and communicate its further concerns, ideas and suggestions at any time. [Those of you who might have a concrete wording to be incorporated into the draft are invited to communicate it as soon as possible, preferably by Friday 15 November.]

A few days later, on 27 November, the fifth open-ended informal consultations will be held providing an opportunity for the Member States to express their views on the non-paper. On the basis of your comments and suggestions, a draft resolution will be prepared and circulated to you on 3 December for another round of your consideration. Subsequently, the sixth informal consultations will be held on 6 December 2002. I believe that the draft resolution can be finalized and adopted in the second week of December so that the work of the General Assembly in 2002 can be concluded as scheduled in its Programme of work. In this respect, I invite you once again, for a constructive collaboration.

At our meeting this afternoon, we will consider proposed Actions 1 through 20 and 25 through 35 of the report of the Secretary-General. This will provide an opportunity for those delegations who did not speak on Actions 1 and 6 through 18 before, to do so now.

Three Conference Room Papers (documents A/57/CRP.1, 2 and 3) have been circulated to delegations and are available at the Documents Distribution Counter in this Room. Let me thank the Secretariat for timely issuance of both CRP.2 and CRP.3 which were distributed to the Member States on Friday 8 November. I assume that all delegations have had enough time to study them prior to the informal consultations.

I would like to propose that we divide our discussion into 2 parts:
- first, we will consider the actions covered by CRP.2, e.g. actions 2 - 5 (strengthening of the human rights), actions 19 - 20 (partnership) and actions 25 - 35 (human resources management),
- second, in the remaining time we will hear some residual comments to CRP.1.