President Klaus Highlights UN’s Limits

Brett Schaefer / September 29, 2010

The United Nations General Debate (the traditional opening of the annual General Assembly session featuring speeches by heads of state) is very predictable. World leaders use their speeches to laud themselves, their countries, and praise the United Nations with assurances that the world body is indispensable amid calls for it to assume even more projects, initiatives and responsibilities. The predictability of the speeches by most world leaders serves to highlight the speeches that are bizarre and, sometimes, appalling. However, even these bizarre speeches have become troublesomely regular and sadly tolerated.

However, we saw a truly unusual speech before the United Nations on Saturday. Czech President Vaclav Klaus interrupted the rote calls for increased global governance – centered, of course on an expanded role for the United Nations – and instead called for the United Nations to be pared back and refocused on its founding principles and divested of the extravagant smorgasbord of its current agenda and budget: (more…)