The State Department's Priorities for the 59th UN General Assembly and Review of UNGA Events This Week

9:10 A.M. EDT

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Good morning, everyone. Good morning, New York. Good morning, Washington. A pleasure to be here today. We've had a very interesting week here at the General Assembly. Before I take your questions, I'd like to take the opportunity just to cover a few points, sort of highlights from the U.S. perspective.

In his speech, President Bush covered the U.S. priorities at the General Assembly and for the United Nations in general. His remarks focused on protecting and cultivating what he called human dignity, a commitment held in common by both the United States and by the United Nations. The President reminded us that we needed a new definition of world security and one which seeks to assure that human dignity is protected. And as he said in his speech, the security of our world is found in the advancing rights of mankind and we must continue to demonstrate our commitment to security by continuing the work we're doing in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and by working on democracy, human rights and freedom.

This theme of supporting human dignity also permeates the United States initiatives at the General Assembly this year. One of those is advancing economic freedom. We will continue to urge the United Nations to implement the formula for economic growth and development that world leaders agreed to in Monterrey, Mexico in 2002. The formula includes national responsibility, it includes good governance, trade liberalization and mobilizing private investment resources.

The United Nations should give more attention, in our estimation, to what countries do domestically to promote economic growth, and private sector initiatives should be mainstreamed throughout the United Nations system.

Another priority for us in this year's General Assembly is ending child sex tourism. The United States seeks to strengthen collaboration to combat trafficking in persons, especially to end child sex tourism.

We are asking governments to immediately expand and invigorate their anti-trafficking efforts through such measures as public education campaigns, increased international law enforcement cooperation, and efforts with the travel and tourism industry to develop systems to identify and to thwart child sex tourists.

Another priority is promoting democracy. The United States believes that democratic nations must work closely together in the United Nations to live up to its founding principles. President Bush announced, as you may recall, in the General Assembly an initiative to create a United Nations Democracy Fund. This Fund's core mission will be to support nations making the transition to democracy by assisting them in training and in capacity building. The Democracy Fund would help countries lay the foundations for democracy by instituting the basic building blocks of democracy, and that is instituting the rule of law, independent courts, free press, independent political parties and trade unions.

Another priority will be banning human cloning. The United States supports efforts to ban all forms of cloning. This year, we will join a large number of states in co-sponsoring a resolution proposed by Costa Rica to draft an international convention against all forms of human cloning.

Another priority will be furthering the roadmap to peace in the Middle East. The United States continues to actively pursue the President's goals of an Israel and Palestine living together in peace and in security, and we would like the United Nations to return its attention to the roadmap and press both parties in the conflict to meet their obligations.

Now, these are the main priorities that we will be focusing on in this assembly, this session of the General Assembly, but that's not all we're going to be doing in the United Nations, and they certainly don't constitute the entirety of our efforts.

In addition to these priorities, we will continue to engage to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, we will work to rally support for the fight against terrorism, to promote human rights, and to assist and protect those in need through the various humanitarian aid work that we do throughout the United Nations system.

We also will continue to work closely with our partners in the Security Council on many issues, such as our ongoing efforts to help the people in Darfur region of Sudan.

Among some of the meetings that I attended this week was the Community of Democracies ministerial with Secretary Powell. The Secretary complimented Foreign Minister Alvear of Chile on all that Chile has done to try to move the efforts forward in the Community of Democracies, and she and many others praised the President's proposal for a Democracy Fund in the United Nations.

I also attended the G-8 Entrepreneurship lunch with the Secretary. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has helped promote the basic idea that businesses, particularly small businesses, create the jobs and the investment that the economies need to grow, and the lunch was a chance to talk about how the G-8 can support this effort.

I would be happy to take any questions that you would have at this point. Yes, sir.

QUESTION: Hi, I'm Mark Turner from Financial Times. I was wondering if you could get into more detail about the UN Democracy Fund that your President is proposing; namely, how it works, in a sense, what kind of organization. Is it going to be part of the existing UN or a separate new thing? Is it going to be actually a multinational fund that you're inviting people to contribute to? And have you got an amount of money in mind? Have you got an idea of how it would be administered to, who would administer it, under what circumstance? I'm just trying to get a sense of how developed this idea is at this stage and who else is supporting it right now.

Thank you.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, we believe that this initiative should be in the United Nations. That is clearly one of the main objectives of having the President raise the idea in his General Assembly speech. We believe that it's vitally important that the United Nations have a more principled focus on democracy and capacity building.

There's a lot of work that the United Nations already does in development. UNDP is involved in this, and even the Secretariat is involved in elections, monitoring and the like. So it's not as if there is not an expertise and capacity already there, but we do believe that it needs greater focus, and we do believe that it needs greater cohesion and even greater financial support.

And so we thought it would be a good idea to get a greater fusion of having a multilateral effort through the UN to help build -- democratic capacity building would be a good idea.

We believe this initiative should be funded with voluntary contributions, and the United States will be providing some seed money. We don't yet have a proposed funding level. We are going to be having consultations and discussions, not only in our government, but also with other countries as well. We've already started these consultations to see what the appropriate levels might be, and as we proceed in these discussions with other countries, we'll be able to make a determination of the appropriate funding level that can make the program effective and successful.

Many participants of the Community of Democracies have already expressed support for this idea. In the ministerial which I was at with the Secretary, a number of countries spoke up in support of it.

So we're just in the beginning of this. We are quite consciously trying to engage in consultations, both with the UN and with other countries, about how this should be set up, because we think that it would benefit from their expertise and their advice. So we don't want to prejudge exactly how it's going to be organized at this point. So I think that it's important that we hear what others have to say.

QUESTION: (Mark Turner) Do you envisage it as a separate fund, or something that's administered by UNDP?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: No, it would be a separate fund.

QUESTION: Okay. Because UNDP tries to (inaudible) itself out of the UN (inaudible) democratization (inaudible) --

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: I know that. I just have mentioned that. That's true. And no, this will be a separate fund. And we will have some consultations with the leadership of UNDP to see how this might relate.

Yes.

QUESTION: (Inaudible.) How many countries in that Community of Democracies?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: How many countries? I'm not sure the exact numbers. It's well over -- I think it's 130, I believe, but I'm not sure the exact number.

QUESTION: (Inaudible.)

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, there was a full number -- maybe we can get the exact number for you. There's a large number of people in there. It's well over 100, I know that. I don't have the exact number.

QUESTION: The European Union?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Most of the European Union, yes.

QUESTION: (Inaudible.)

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Yes, they were.

QUESTION: They were?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Yeah. France's minister made a statement, as a matter of fact, very good one.

QUESTION: Neeme Raud from Estonia’s Postimees. We hear constantly the talk about UN reform, because of expanding Security Council. What are United States specific ideas? What should be reformed? Can you propose any specific changes in the Security Council? Expand on that.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: The United States has an historic interest in reform in the United Nations that goes back a very long way. This is not a topic that is new to us, that has existed in past administrations, and there is an interest and commitment to continuing the effectiveness and efficiency of the United Nations in this administration.

If you have an opportunity, you may go to our website of the State Department's International Organizations Bureau. There's a number of speeches there that I've given over the last two years that sort of lays out our philosophy and approach to UN reform in some detail, plus there's also an article that I did for the National Interest website, where I did an essay on United Nations reform. I don't have the website address, but it's the National Interest -- web version of the National Interest that goes into that in some detail.

We are obviously, given the interest that we have in reform, looking forward to the high-level panel's report that we are expecting in the next few weeks and the final report sometime in December for revitalizing the United Nations.

As you will see in those essays and in speeches that I have given before, the yardstick that we like to use, want to use, to measure the effectiveness, the measure of the desirability of any particular reform, is effectiveness. Now, we will evaluate all the proposals that come out of the high-level panel and see how they -- see whether they improve the effectiveness of the Security Council, the General Assembly or the entire UN system.

Another yardstick is, obviously, in order for any change or reform to come to the United Nations, there has to be a broad consensus on the particular proposals; otherwise, there will not be adequate support in the General Assembly and elsewhere for the reforms to be effective.

So we are looking forward to the report. Hopefully, we'll find many ideas in there, I am sure, that we will be welcome and be able to support. We'll all just have to wait and see what comes out of it.

QUESTION: Does the United States have any ideas, specifically, itself for reform?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, I was using the shorthand of the speeches to go into some detail but, yes, of course. We believe that the General Assembly needs to be more streamlined and more efficient. There should be fewer redundant resolutions passed by the General Assembly. Some kind of mechanism in reforming of, perhaps, the General Committee and the like that allows the agenda of the General Assembly to be more focused, I think, would be certainly a step forward. The previous president of the General Assembly made some progress in this direction in his focus on General Assembly reform, but I think, frankly, more could be done.

Secondly, we believe that the Commission on Human Rights would vastly be improved if it had more democratic members. Having members on the committee -- on the Commission, rather, that seem to be there for the express purposes of preventing criticism by the Commission, in the case of Cuba, for example, undermines the legitimacy and the integrity of the Commission.

And this goes in line with the Democracy Fund and the idea of a Democracy Caucus. We believe there's a democracy deficit in the United Nations. There needs to be a greater focus on the value of democratic self-governance. What's happening in Afghanistan with some 10 million voters being registered in Afghanistan, with the elections very soon, we hope there will be elections in Iraq very soon -- this is not an easy process. The building of democracy never is. But we think that the United Nations and the nations of the world would benefit more if there was a greater focus on democracy. And so the Democracy Caucus, the Democracy Fund, our focus on reforming the Commission of Human Rights fits into this theme.

The third reform idea is something we've insisted on for a number of years now, is that it's very important in the United Nations, when it is adding new programs to its budget, that it find ways to phase out some old programs or some kind of a system that reviews which old programs no longer may be needed. So, as you add new ones, you find ones that are to be taken off. As a matter of fact, this is supposed to be in the budgetary rules of the United Nations. There needs to be greater focus on implementing those budgetary rules.

So those are just a couple of ideas that we have about reforming the UN.

QUESTION: As a follow-up on this, do you have any position on this idea of semi-permanent members?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: You may be -- are you referring to the idea that is being -- some people say that this is an idea that's in the panel report. It remains to be seen whether or not that will be formally proposed by the panel. We don't know if that's the case.

But we are in a listening mode on any of these proposals on Security Council expansion and reform. We have the President and the Secretary have said repeatedly, for example, that we would support and welcome permanency for Japan. We think it's in Japan's interest. But we will wait and see what the proposal says exactly because you just can't look at the question of Japan in isolation; there's various proposals and we want to be able to deal with what the proposal is exactly before we come up with any kind of response at this point.

QUESTION: (Mark Turner) A follow-up on democracy. This is something you've talked about in a number of places, including on the Council of Foreign Relations last year. Do you envisage, you know, a greater formalization of the sort of Democratic Caucus within the UN? Do you think that the charter should be amended to include some sort of commitment to democracy? Should the UN, as an organization itself, put democracy more centrally at the core of its values?

And then just finally on that question, how does that fit in with the UN's continued refusal to recognize Taiwan, a democracy, as opposed to China, which is not?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: The way we envision the Democracy Caucus at this point is it's an informal mechanism that allows democracies, member-states who are democracies in the United Nations, to come together and to, first of all, discuss how they might coordinate their support for various resolutions either on democratic-related resolutions, certainly in the early stages, or perhaps even other resolutions that may not necessarily be related to democratic self-governance.

But I would think that the first task -- this is what's happened already in Geneva with the meetings of the Community of Democracies or a Democracy Caucus in Geneva -- has already had some success in coordinating their votes on human rights resolutions in the Commission. They have voted, for example, on a resolution that created more funding for capacity building at the High Commissioners Office. That was just one example.

So the first phase would be an informal coordination on resolutions supporting democratic self-governance. Now, we have to get comfortable with that. We have to let countries realize that there is an advantage to that, that it's beneficial. We have to also proceed in such a way that it becomes obvious to everyone that this caucus is not trying to supplant or substitute for regional groupings, that it's supplemental to, in addition to.

And then once we've done that, we perhaps could move into a second phase, hopefully fairly soon, in which perhaps the Democracy Caucus could be used to coordinate votes on elections inside the regional groupings. In other words, every region of the world has democracies and it would seem to be incumbent upon all of these regional groupings that when they're deciding who's going to be a member of the Commission on Human Rights that they, instead of having rotation schemes all the time, they should try to put their best foot forward and put democracies from their region on the Commission of Human Rights. And maybe the Democracy Caucus could help advance that idea and perhaps, in some cases, in other cases perhaps even coordinate, in appropriate situations, other elections maybe of leaders as well of the various UN agencies or committees.

Now, where it might evolve in the future I cannot say. We have to be, I think, very, very careful that we don't become -- that we take it one step at a time. I mean, I have my own personal views about it. I think that anything that enhances the focus on democracy in the United Nations is a good thing, but also this is an organization that has universal membership and not all countries are democracies. And so we have to be mindful of being -- of the practical nature of the institution and try to move in a way that is effective. So we'll just have to wait and see how it evolves and, hopefully, the more successful it is, the more we can move into future stages.

QUESTION: And Taiwan a democracy and China not a democracy?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, I mean, we have long-established, you know, positions and procedures, you know, both in U.S. policy on that and even in the UN. We'll have to wait and see how that develops.

QUESTION: Corine Lesnes, Le Monde. About Article 51 and this idea of reformulating this article to address this problem of preventive self-defense, do you have a position on that?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, the Security Council has mentioned Article 51, but it's not just Article 51, has the legal capability and right, if you will, to be able to authorize interventions and actions on the part of the Council that could be determined as preventive. After all, if we were to determine that genocide is occurring somewhere or about to occur, the only way that the Council could have any meaningful reaction to that is to try to prevent it, and not simply wait until it has occurred and then go out and have some kind of intervention against it. It's just built into the very nature of trying to prevent humanitarian disasters like genocide.

Sometimes, I think mistakenly, it's concluded that the intervention in Iraq was a preemptive action in the sense that it's -- in the way that it's sometimes discussed. We do not believe that's the case. We were -- we believe that we were implementing many United Nations resolutions -- 678, 687 and 1441 -- which detailed not only Iraq's obligations and its refusal to disarm, but also the consequences of noncompliance. So that doesn't fit into, in our estimation, this idea of preemption and prevention; it was implementing existing 17 resolutions altogether. We realize not all members of the Council agreed with that particular interpretation, but that was our firm belief.

All nations have the right to defend themselves, even certainly under the charter, and I think that it is best to understand that every particular case that may require prevention will have to be looked at on a case-by-case basis, and the Security Council may be involved in some, maybe in others not. But it's an idea that we look forward to the panel's reports on this and see what their views are on it, but I just wanted to make clear to everyone that sometimes as everyone -- sometimes people make a conclusion that the Iraq intervention was a preventive action in this sense of the word, and we do not believe that it was.

QUESTION: We heard this week the Secretary General saying that international law is in danger. There have been speeches about -- I read an article by Javier Solana saying that the multicultural side of the world, the state of -- not multicultural, multilateral states that want a multilateral approach and then somehow there is this other side. The allusion was that this is the United States that wants to be more unilateral.

Do you think this kind of talk that the world is on a crossroads and has to choose now what approach to take is fair, and what's the United States position?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, I think that that is not the reality of the stark choices before us. It seems to me the reality, particularly in an era where you have a rising threat of terrorism, you have failed states in many parts of the world that's creating new kinds of instability and challenges to the security of people, that this is the real threat to the international order and international law; and in order for the United Nations, the Security Council and international law to be taken seriously, it is important that the international community have the political will to follow through not only on the resolutions that it passes but also to be able to defend their societies against these kinds of threats. Yes, it must be done in conformity to international law and the United States firmly believes that that is what we are doing.

So I don't see that there is a stark choice there. Some people had a different political view of not only of how the war on terrorism should be prosecuted but also on the war in Iraq, and sometimes they, in my estimation, make the mistake of turning a political disagreement into one over, supposedly, one side adhering to international law and another not.

I don't think that that is an accurate representation of the debate, but it's not very useful either because it's just like the old debate between multilateralism and unilateralism was not very helpful either because it didn't accurately reflect the realities of what the choices were. That was the mistake of that particular debate, and it's important for us to get below the level and look at really what we're talking about before we can have, I think, an accurate understanding of what the problems are.

Yes, sir.

QUESTION: Marco Bardazzi, Italian News Agency ANSA. Could you give us an update about the support that you are receiving for the resolution on cloning?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, we are looking forward to working with Costa Rica and other countries to support their resolution on cloning. Last year there was a similar effort made on a resolution in the General Assembly and many people were surprised that, when it came to the final vote, that that resolution did as well as it did. It came within one vote of actually passing, and on an issue as potentially as divisive, or is as divisive as cloning is in the United Nations, that was quite a step forward, in our estimation.

So we are looking forward to moving it forward again. I cannot, at this point, predict when a vote may occur. There are some over 50 co-sponsors. I don't have the exact number. I think it's 52 co-sponsors already that are signed up for the Costa Rican resolution and we hope that we'll be able to move forward on it.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) strongly within the UN on cloning when the debate has nowhere near been resolved actually at home in the U.S.?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, the President believes, as you heard in his speech, he believes very strongly that it's important for -- his view -- but for the, in our view, for the purposes of making sure that the technology and the science doesn't get ahead of the ethical standards that we have clarity on this issue. He is pursuing his views on cloning both domestically and internationally to be consistent with this views on this policy.

Many countries, even some of the countries that have domestic legislation that actually bans all cloning, including research or therapeutic, are taking positions differently in the international arena. And so that presents sort of an interesting question.

Most of the people I talk to, even the ones who are not quite sure about the therapeutic, banning of therapeutic, in other words, banning of total -- having a total ban, everyone seems to realize that it's important that we have some ethical standards before science gets ahead of us on this, that we need some kind of guidance.

And so we think that having a stand like this in the international community is important to raise the consciousness of people to the importance of the issue and to get a discussion going on so it just doesn't go below the radar screen and we find ourselves one day facing these huge advances in science and then everyone tries to catch up with the debate, as if this somehow is an issue that came out of nowhere.

QUESTION: (Inaudible.) What, then, would be the kind of sanction on nations that then broke the ban? Or would it -- I mean, would it have any actual practical impact at UN-level sanctions?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, like all General Assembly resolutions, they are not legally binding. They are political directions, if you will, from the UN and the international community. I mean, that's just the nature of the General Assembly.

What may develop afterwards, in terms of some convention or something to that effect, that would be something that would have to come through negotiation. But it could -- it would be seen as the start of that kind of a more serious discussion on what the kind of legal ramifications should be on a total ban. This resolution would be the start of that.

QUESTION: Then it's -- I mean, the argument that the other side pushes, that instead of them having a big, empty meaningless statement to the General Assembly on something that clearly divides the world pretty well 50/50, why not actually just come to a basic agreement to regulate it, which could actually unite the world 100 percent?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, the purpose of us raising this issue is not necessarily to unite the world, so to speak, or to create just a consensus. That's not the only purpose. We have a certain point of view about how we think the outcome should be, which is, in the President's view, in our view, is morally grounded. And so we feel that we have to speak what we believe.

QUESTION: (Corine Lesnes) Back to Iraq. When the Security Council (inaudible) Resolution 1546, but then new countries come up with troops even for protecting the UN, do you think this is enhancing the credibility of the organization?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, we have always said and we have been vigorously trying to support getting protection for troops, financial support for protecting troops for the United Nations mission in Iraq. We have been vigorously involved in that for the last year and we believe that it's vitally important.

There are negotiations going on with countries. Hopefully, in the very near future, we'll be able to report that there are some countries that are not only providing troops but also financial support. I can't go into the details of it, but there seems to be an opening there.

I know that the Secretary General is very mindful of security for his people in the UN. We understand that and that's why we're doing everything we can to try to make sure he gets the financial and the protective support for his personnel so the monitoring of the elections can go forward.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) the UN's role in helping the electoral commission in these elections, and yet the UN has 35 people as a limit in Iraq, of which only five are elections experts. Is that sufficient? Is the UN actually fulfilling its obligation to help Iraq with these five people?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: We would like to see more UN personnel in Iraq and that's why we're working as hard as we can to get them the protection so they can increase that number.

QUESTION: On terrorism, apparently, the UN terror list is not working so well. I'm wondering if you have an idea about new tools for the UN, or a new leaf or something like that that you think would be better and more effective.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, we were very much supporters of the creation of the executive for the Counterterrorism Committee and I had the pleasure of seeing Ambassador Peres* (ph) while I was here this week to talk to him about how to get the executive up and running. And we think that the whole counterterrorism machinery in the UN -- the 1267 committee, the al-Qaida committee, 1373 committee -- you know, they got off to a good start, they got the reports back from 191 countries about what -- not only what they were going to counter terrorism but also recognizing the validity of the request.

Now we have to move into the more difficult phase. We have to move into implementation. And we're hoping that the counterterrorism committee and the executive that's being created around it will be able to move this more forward in a more effective way. We have advocated and I have made clear that we hope this will happen as soon as possible, but it takes time and we'll see at that point what might be done to increase the coordination with the other committees that have already been created.

QUESTION: I was wondering, on a general -- a lot of us who are correspondents in the UN at the moment take the organization to be at a sort of low ebb, morale is low, there seems to be some lack of direction in the Security Council and uncertainty what Security Council resolutions actually mean or achieve. The General Assembly seems to be somewhat suspended (inaudible) putting forth arguments towards next year, but there seems to be not very much debate about what to do now.

Can you detect a certain malaise at the heart of the organization as it wonders what on earth it's about and where it's going?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Not at the level I'm at. Not the people I talk to. Everyone is -- we all know what the difficulties are and all of the issues that we're dealing with. There is a huge amount of work that the UN is doing these days that they may not have been doing ten years ago. You not only have every major international crisis that's coming into the UN (inaudible), from Iraq to Afghanistan to Darfur in Sudan, and then you have the tremendous increased peacekeeping operations in Africa and elsewhere. You have Haiti and now the discussion of how and what to do about the expansion of MONUC in the Congo. There is -- I have never seen the United Nations so heavily involved in trying to settle hugely important issues to the world.

At the same time, these are all extremely difficult, and I'm not just talking about the issues associated with international terrorism or the Middle East, but the new ones that they're engaging in, and the member-states have different opinions about how these problems should be solved.

And so I think that what you're seeing is is that the international community as a whole is struggling with a number of new challenges and they're trying to figure a way forward on how to deal with humanitarian problems like Sudan, how to deal with terrorism, how to deal with failed states, how to have a more efficient system in place to deal with post-conflict situations. These are all very hard problems. None of them are easy. And I think that most of the people I deal with in the UN are just focused on trying to solve them and that's -- well, they're practical about that.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) missions in the Congo and Haiti and Liberia and so forth come under the rubric of UN peacekeeping (inaudible) context of peacekeeping (inaudible), but the reality is it's almost state running and certainly nation building. Do you think that there needs to be sort of an appreciation of the fact that the UN is, in certain areas of the world, in the business of nation-building, should reorganize itself to reflect that?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, there is a huge debate on that right now and I think that there are a number of people who are looking at their national capacities and what can be done to try to improve nation building to post-conflict reconciliation. We are doing that in the State Department, as you probably know. We are creating a new office of post-conflict -- I don't know the exact title for it -- management may be the title, and we're looking at improving our planning and capacity-building process to be able to react to crises in a more quick and efficient way. I believe the UK is doing the same thing. And there's a debate underway in the UN how they can better coordinate its various post-conflict activities.

I think you're right, it's not just peacekeeping anymore. There needs to be ways for the United Nations to have a more efficient coordination of all the things it does in this area as well as to have the same kind of debate at the national level. So this will probably -- I'm sure this will be dealt with by the panel report, too. I'm sure there will be some recommendations coming out of that. And so we look forward to that and being able to bring our own experiences into this debate and see how we might be able to improve their capacity. But I think your question is right on. It's something that we need to think about very seriously and we are, in fact, starting to do so.

QUESTION: Last year, at your speech at the Council of Foreign Relations, you said the moment is some historical moment to really get to (inaudible). Do you think this year the time is better?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, you know, I don't know. I honestly don't know because it all depends on whether or not the specific proposals from the reform really relate to real problems at hand or whether or not it's just old political issues that have been around for a long time using the opportunity of the panel to reemerge and have another discussion.

I think this post-conflict issue, the nation building, is truly necessary to have some hard looks into how the UN could be better organized to deal with that, and I think we can probably get some consensus on that. I'm hopeful that we could, is a better way of putting it.

But on the other issues it might be more difficult. I don't know. I don't know if we can reach consensus on Security Council expansion. It's just simply an unknown to me. We know who the countries are that are advocating it and there are some who are unsure. So whether or not they will be immobile on that, it's just too early to tell.

In some ways, this is a challenge to the panel report, to whether or not the recommendations that are making are truly answering the needs of the time. and I hope that it will, and to the extent that it will we will do everything we can to try to work with other nations and the Secretary General to implement them.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) curious mix of pragmatism and idealism, and I never really --

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: It's the American way. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: We all know that we have this (inaudible) century and (inaudible), then, on the other hand, you give an impassioned, much more familiar to the British argument of the nature that the pragmatic results, to hell with the principles, let's get to --

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: No, not to tell with the principles.

QUESTION: But the argument that a lot of people are pinning on the reform of the Security Council is this rather loose concept of legitimacy, and there's not so much a democracy deficit but a legitimacy deficit that they're talking about. And they're saying until you address that core lack of legitimacy in the decision-making processes, no matter what practical thing, conclusions, measures you formulate within the Security Council, it's not going to have the support of the people who are supposed to be doing it.

Do you think there's a legitimacy deficit at the heart of the UN? Do you think that the Security Council needs to improve its legitimacy?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: I suppose, Mark -- I hate to answer a question with a question, but I don't really fully understand what is meant by a -- how a perception of a legitimacy deficit is dealing with a particular problem that is real and concrete --

QUESTION: (Inaudible) financing. A lot of countries which have been (inaudible) an international norm, and you might even say law, that has been set by the Security Council that all these countries have got to do certain things on stamping out terrorist financing. a lot of those countries might say, "We have no part in the decision that is imposing on us, requiring us to do certain things." And the arguments of -- the legitimacy argument is that if those countries felt that they had had greater representation on the body and had set that norm, they might be more willing to implement that norm and do things about making it a practical reality and that will actually stamp out sources of terrorist financing. (Inaudible.)

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: Well, we'll have to see how this panel report comes out. I just would say, and by way of sort of ending the session here, is that I honestly have a difficult understanding, really, the true nature of this legitimacy debate because, on the one hand, for many years, for decades, we heard that the United Nations, as it existed, was the source of legitimacy for multilateral actions and various other decisions. And the President, two and a half years ago, brought the issue of Iraq to the Council because he was persuaded that this was an important issue, we need to bring it to the Council, and because the United Nations was a source of legitimacy.

Now the debate is shifting a bit, and it's as if somehow the United Nations, the way it's currently constructed, is not a source of legitimacy as some had believed it was before. We may have to have a number of seminars to figure that out. I don't think it's just a question of the terrorism issue. I, frankly, think that most nations, responsible nations of the world, don't need a reform of the United Nations in order to combat terrorism. I mean, the moral argument should be compelling as it is. Any responsible nation should understand the importance of that. And the fact that there is -- I just don't see anything structurally in the UN that would necessarily improve what it -- the reasons why some countries are having some difficulties.

Most of the countries that they're having difficulties, there's two categories: ones that don't have the capacity and need some help, and so may need to give them some technical assistance to comply; and the others who just simply don't want to because they have political reasons that they don't want to comply. And I don't think having the UN restructured would change the latter category. And the first category is really more a question of aid and capacity building.

So, in that particular area you gave, I haven't really run into a political resistance as the main problem. It was the two main categories I just gave to you.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

MS. NISBET: I know it's been a terribly busy week, so I really thank you for making the time.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HOLMES: My pleasure.

MS. NISBET: Thank you.