(E-038/01)
February 20, 2001SEMINAR EXAMINES THE ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN DEFENDING AND PROMOTING DEMOCRACY
The Secretary General of the Organization of American States, César Gaviria, declared today that, although the OAS was originally oriented towards economic and trade issues, its fundamental rationale is "its unwavering commitment to the defense and promotion of democracy".
In a statement to a seminar on "The Role of Regional and Multilateral Organizations in Strengthening Democracy", the Secretary General maintained that resolution 1080, approved in 1991 during the General Assembly in Santiago, Chile, "has been the cornerstone in the struggle for the defense of democracy".
In his opinion, over the last decade "we have been successful in defending democracy and overcoming crises, but we cannot necessarily say that our institutions are not still vulnerable, or that we have made consistent progress in consolidating democracy throughout the hemisphere".
Among the threats to democracy, he pointed to the inability to deal with the problems of poverty, dysfunctional government, corruption, the lack of transparency, drug trafficking and others. "We still have many weaknesses, and although we have been able to cope with crises we are not doing enough to consolidate democracy and provide needed support in countries where democratic institutions are most vulnerable", he stressed.
Opening the discussion, the Chair of the OAS Permanent Council, Ambassador Esteban Tomic of Chile, said that "if there is one single task that all the peoples of the world need to address, it is to consolidate and improve democracy as a system of government".
Another speaker, Juan Gabriel Valdés, Ambassador of Chile to the United Nations, noted that the defense and promotion of democracy is a central foreign policy concern for the vast majority of American countries. "Democracy is one of the cornerstones of the inter-American system and one of the basic principles for the functioning of the Rio Group, the key mechanism for regional policy coordination in Latin America", he said. Ambassador Valdés warned of unmistakable signs that political parties are in decline, politics is losing its legitimacy, and the sense of community is collapsing in Latin America. "It is these factors that explain the growing public indifference to the democratic political process in many of our countries", he declared.
The seminar will continue through this afternoon and tomorrow, when speakers will include the Assistant Secretary General of the OAS, Luigi Einaudi, the former United States Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, the Vice Minister of Foreign Relations of the Czech Republic, Martin Palous, and the Minister of Justice of Peru, Diego Garcia Sayán.