UN General Assembly
1997

would represent a major step forward towards a world that would offer greater security for all. In this context, we hope to see the Ottawa process, in which we are participants, succeed, by the end of this year, in the signing of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction. Eradicating poverty throughout the world has been and remains one of the fundamental objectives of the United Nations. By proclaiming in the Charter their determination to establish better standards of living in conditions of broader freedom, the founding fathers wanted to make of the United Nations an instrument that would fight for the social progress of all humankind. But at the present time, planet Earth is threatened by global challenges that know no boundaries and that spare no peoples. The world’s problems — poverty, exclusion, terrorism, organized crime and drug-trafficking — have become globalized far earlier than the economy has. That is why, regardless of the way in which we approach the