Azerbaijan , Baku /corr Trend A.Ismayilova/
Trend excluisve interview with the Chairman of the 61 st General Assembly, H.E. Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa
Question: Reform of the United Nations is one of the core problems that UN leadership is dealing with. How do you view the way forward?
Answer: Reform is a major issue at the UN. It is not a simple single shot medicine that you can administer to any problem and get it solved. Rather, there is a growing convergence of opinion that reform is a continuous process. Secretariat reform involves many areas: administrative, budgetary and financial. There are also some legal areas. For instance, the assembly is awaiting the Secretary-General's report on the reform of the internal justice system , which has its legal aspects and relates to many serious concerns by the UN staff .
As for the reform of intergovernmental bodies, we have several questions that are pending. For one, there is Security Council reform which is paramount for many delegations .
Another area relates to the coherence of the UN system: how to make it more efficient and relevant to the international political and developmental agenda. One of my priority areas of reform is the revitalization of the General Assembly as the main deliberative and policy-making body at the UN.
We are continuing our efforts on all these fronts and on one of the major issues, that of the reform of the Security Council, I have launched a new process of consultations among Member States, through focusing on five subject areas in the context of the overall reform of the Security Council. My intention is to explore the areas where there is an emerging agreement among the Membership, in order to lock in some building blocks for future discussions.
Question: One of the reasons necessitating the reform of the UN is the importance to face contemporary challenges, in particular the settlement of the protracted conflicts. The issue of protracted conflicts in the territory of GUAM ( Georgia , Ukraine , Azerbaijan and Moldova ) has been included in the agenda of the 61 st session of the General Assembly at the initiative of GUAM . How could it contribute in the conflict resolution process?
Answer: Solving or helping to solve any problem can lead to the possible solution of another. Of course, that depends on the exact nature of each protracted conflict, but lessons learned from one success story can only help us achieve more success in other conflicts.
Question: As for the item "Situation in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan" , the report by the OSCE-led mission on ecological monitoring which has been presented to the OSCE and submitted to the Secretariat for distribution among the UN member-states. Have you seen the report and how could this document contribute to the issue at hand?
Answer: Any report's usefulness is judged by the amount of consensus of opinion it can help achieve. In the final analysis, it is up to member-states to determine what is useful and what is not.