China is on track to meet almost all of the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), said one top UN official yesterday in Beijing, while urging for more focused efforts from other countries as the world in general "is certainly not on track."
"In China, the results look quite good, but they are not so good for other parts of the world," said UN Under-Secretary Ann M. Veneman.
Veneman made the remarks as she and other top UN officials appeared yesterday in a one-hour encounter to communicate with the media, academics, civil societies and the government on UN reforms and September's UN summit.
The discussion was part of the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women, which was held in Beijing in 1995.
At the UN summit in 2000, human-centred development goals and targets including poverty-reduction, education promotion and health data collection were included in the principles of UN's Millennium Development Goals, which was adopted by world leaders.
Targets include halving the proportion of people whose income is less than US$1 a day between 1990 and 2015, and also ensuring that by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling. Other goals include eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005 and in all levels of education by no later than 2015.
The senior officials also said a core group of representatives from 30 countries have been working on extensive consultations on the most contentious topics regarding UN reform and forming so-called "outcome documents," which will be declared at the September UN world leader summit.
Zephirin Diabre, UN Under-Secretary General, said the UN body is serious about creating accountability despite the existence of difficulties in some aspects of management.
Diabre also said it is important to have an enlarged number of seats in the UN Security Council, but there are still some urgent issues ahead.
"The organization (UN) is still in the aftermath of some bad behaviour by certain officials, but we must look ahead to the future," said the official. "The UN is not a broker."
"We must have the freedom and ability to put these reforms forward and we are confident that we can fix this," said Diabre. "Over 60 years we've overcome certain challenges and collective wisdom will prevail."
(China Daily 08/30/2005 page2)
