UN General Assembly
2004

I should like to begin by congratulating Mr. Jean Ping on his election as President of the fifty-ninth session of the General Assembly. He may be sure that Austria will fully support him in carrying out his important task. I fully subscribe to the statement made by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands on behalf of the European Union, which expressed the position of the European Union regarding the various global and regional challenges we face today. I would like to emphasize a few additional points from our own perspective. Over the past few years we have had to reassess key concepts of our national and international security environment. With the emergence of new and complex threats, in particular terrorism in combination with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the international community faces unprecedented challenges for which it has to find legitimate responses. Just recently, we witnessed the horrifying terrorist attack against innocent school children in Beslan. This was only the last of a whole series of heinous attacks in all regions of the world targeted