UN General Assembly
2007

officially announce the beginning of the decade of Chernobyl, thus ensuring the cooperation and solidarity of the international community. From this rostrum much has been said about the problems of the Doha round of negotiations on international trade. There is one more aspect of this subject, the unacceptable practice of certain countries that use the process of accession to membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a convenient instrument of pressure on candidate countries. This has involved not only economic pressure, in order to receive coerced and unilateral additional benefits from WTO expansion, but also political pressure. The United Nations must take a firm stand in favour of establishing, with the participation of all interested States, fair conditions for WTO accession that take into account the trade and financial needs of the acceding countries and their genuine development needs. Belarus rejects the use of unilateral coercive measures in international relations as an instrument of political and economic pressure on sovereign States. Such measures not only contradict the principles of the United Nations Charter and international law but breed