UN General Assembly
2019

On occasions such as this, we all are challenged to ask ourselves at the deepest level if we are being true to the values and principles of the Charter of the United Nations. Are those values and principles informing our practices as States Members of the United Nations? Are they being invoked to face the challenges that we are debating this week? For so many, such questions evoke life-and- death realities. As we meet, the United Nations and its agencies are under attack, whether through underfunding or withdrawal of support, and now so often by the explicit promotion of the narrowest version of a theory of interests by some of the most powerful, which is the very antithesis of the multilateralism that the Charter demands.