Romania’s President Addresses the UN

Eradicating poverty, assuring sustainable development and observing gender equality have been some of the issues approached by President Klaus Iohannis at the UN.

Roxana Vasile, 28.09.2015, 13:31

The United Nations
Organisation is the main forum of debate in the world. Gathered at the UN
headquarters in New York, to attend the 70th UN General Assembly,
leaders from all over the world delivered speeches and made commitments. After
the adoption of the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development, Romania will
revise its National Sustainable Development Strategy, president Iohannis
underlined, and will integrate the 17 goals and 169 targets agreed upon at the
New York Summit. The 2030 agenda is meant to eradicate poverty under all its
forms and to assure sustainable development.

What will Romania lay emphasis on?
Addressing the heads of state and government attending the UN summit, Klaus
Iohannis said Romania’s strategy lays emphasis on granting greater support to
people with disabilities, youth and women, which should be better included in
development policies. Decent employment opportunities are necessary in the
effort to eradicate poverty and social cohesion policies should be pursued in
order to prevent and avoid social exclusion, the Romanian president also said.
Poverty, the lack of hope, despair and social exclusion should be contained
because they are at the core of all conflicts, the seed of violence and
extremism, Klaus Iohannis went on to say. That is why, each nation has the
moral obligation to save and support people.

The president gave a recent
example, referring to the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled war in the past few months,
searching for a better life, trying to cross into Europe, more often than not
risking their lives. This growing inflow of migrants from the Middle East and
Africa has prompted the European countries to make huge efforts to prevent a
wide scale humanitarian disaster. We are facing a complex crisis, with
significant humanitarian aspects, a crisis of border protection, a crisis of
integration and a financial crisis, the Romanian president said. If we don’t
find the best means to solve each of these crises, each wave of migration will
exceed the previous one, Klaus Iohannis underlined.

Also at the UN headquarters,
Romania’s president stood for promoting women’s rights, a prerequisite for
social justice, development and peace. Klaus Iohannis also said he was
personally committed, as part of the Impact 30 strategy, to launching a new
integrated system meant to monitor, report and prevent all forms of violence,
to create a new profession, that of expert on gender equality, as well as to
develop and implement programs aimed at convincing girls and boys to get
involved in the country’s political, social and economic life, in order to
create a new generation of leaders. Klaus Iohannis gave assurances that Romania
supports gender equality, will protect and promote all women’s rights and will
implement the international legal instruments in the field.