Mr. President,
The Group of 77 and China expresses its appreciation to you and the
facilitators for the efforts made in preparing this document for our
consideration.
I wish to draw your attention, however, to the situation which faces
us at this point in our consultations.
Member States were asked
to consider proposals put forward by the Secretary-General in his report “In Larger Freedom…” which
could form the basis for consultations on decisions to be taken by
the Summit in September.
In order to facilitate this process, a draft outcome document was prepared
by you and consultations have been taking place for some time now.
In response to the 1 st draft,
a number of comments were submitted and questions were raised by the
Group. However, not only are we concerned that we see very little reflection,
if any, of the Group’s input
in the revised text, but are surprised that this text contains new proposals
which did not appear in the Secretary-General’s report nor in the
draft outcome document which was presented for our consideration.
Many of these proposals are for the establishment of institutional
structures and arrangements which could have far-reaching implications
especially for the role of the General Assembly and in particular, the
Fifth Committee which is the administrative and budgetary Committee of
the General Assembly, and their consideration would require a process
of negotiation before any decision could be taken on such issues, as
is the case in paragraphs:
- 140 - creation of an independent audit advisory committee
- 144 – creation
of an independent ethics office
- 146 – forming
an external expert team to work with the Secretary-General on the
implementation of reform provisions
- 147 – Convening
by the President of the General Assembly of a group of Permanent
Representatives to work with him on management and oversight issues
Regarding paragraph 136, the Group does not accept that the Secretary-General
should be given broad authority to redeploy posts. The General Assembly
has already granted him the flexibility to re-deploy 50 posts, on an
experimental basis and report to it on its implementation. We therefore
await this report at the upcoming 60 th session.
We reiterate that it is the role of the General Assembly to re-deploy
resources to priority areas and not the Secretary-General.
The Group is therefore not in a position, at this stage, to consider
these new proposals, many of which would be more appropriately dealt
with at the technical rather than at the summit level. We would also
request that responses be provided (possibly in a conference room paper)
to the questions raised and clarifications sought by the Group on some
of the proposals. This would facilitate our consideration of the document.
Mr. President,
The Group of 77 and China, as stated in its first intervention on this
section, welcomes the opportunity to engage constructively in consultations
in order to ensure a successful outcome of the High-level Plenary Meeting
of the General Assembly in September this year.
I thank you.
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