The UN General Assembly on Friday elected as its next president the foreign minister who helped spearhead Switzerland’s campaign to join the UN less than eight years ago.
Joseph Deiss was the only candidate for the one-year post, which rotates among the world’s regions.
The 192 member world body elected Deiss by acclamation, rather than a vote, and then burst into applause.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The 64-year-old Swiss politician will take over from the current president, Ali Abdessalam Treki of Libya, on Sept. 14 when the 65th session of the General Assembly opens. Soon after, he will preside over the annual gathering of world leaders and a special session called by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to assess progress in achieving UN anti-poverty goals.
In his acceptance speech, Deiss urged the assembled diplomats not only to defend their national interests but to follow the UN Charter’s call “to be friends, working together ... to cooperate for the benefit of our planet and of humankind.”
He said international cooperation will be especially important in addressing key issues that the General Assembly will be focusing on in the next session — how to accelerate global efforts to fight poverty and promote development, prevent new economic and financial crises, protect the environment, ensure stable food supplies for all people and rebuild countries emerging from conflict, to name a few.
“The people of the world are watching us and hoping,” Deiss said. “We do not have the right to let them down.”
Austria’s UN Ambassador Thomas Mayr-Harting, speaking on behalf of the Western European and Others Group which nominated Deiss, called his election “a recognition of Switzerland’s important contribution to the United Nations within the first decade of her membership.”
Deiss brings “a wealth of experience” as a former president of the Swiss Confederation and minister of economy and foreign affairs to the General Assembly presidency, he said.
From the founding of the UN in 1945, Switzerland insisted on maintaining its neutrality and for decades it remained a UN observer, unable to vote on any UN resolutions. In 1986, the Swiss voted against UN membership in a referendum, but 16 years later in a second referendum they voted “yes” by a slim majority.
Deiss, who was foreign minister at the time, campaigned for UN membership saying the world had changed, the Cold War was over and it was time for Switzerland to take part in UN decisions and raise issues it deemed important.
In his new job, Deiss will have the opportunity to preside over the world’s primary forum for debate.
Unlike the more powerful 15 member Security Council, whose decisions are legally binding, the General Assembly’s resolutions carry no legal force.
But the assembly, modeled after national parliaments, controls the UN budget and decides how much each nation should contribute.
It also serves as a unique forum for discussion of virtually every global issue.
Switzerland’s current foreign minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey, noted that Deiss has literally climbed Switzerland’s highest mountain and called his election “an important milestone on Switzerland’s path since it became a UN member.”
“Mr. Deiss has shown leadership. He knows very well what it means to seek compromises, what it means to seek consensus and to build bridges,” she said. “He also knows that you have to be patient and persistent and take each step at a time.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.