UN News Centre.
May 30, 2001.
29 May – The United Nations has completed a three-day decolonization
seminar in Havana, Cuba, which attracted a record number of participants who
focused on new challenges facing the world's Non-Self-Governing Territories.
The seminar, which was attended by 124 participants - more than any such
event held over the past decade - adopted a report containing a series of
recommendations for the General Assembly's "Special Committee of 24,"
which deals with decolonization issues.
As the seminar concluded on Friday, the Chairman of the Special Committee,
Julian R. Hunte, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade of Saint
Lucia, said that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the business of
decolonization was not something to be relegated to the back burner. "To be
free no matter how small they [the Non-Self-Governing Territories] are -- that
is what the Committee is about," he said.
Cuba's Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Abelardo Moreno Fernandez, told
participants that peoples of the Southern Hemisphere were being "recolonized"
as problems of debt, unequal trade terms, contagious diseases and a lack of
drinking water worsened. He said the Special Committee's regional seminars were
important not only to supplement the Committee's work but also as a vehicle to
inform international opinion on everything that remained to be done in order to
achieve decolonization, and on the important role played by the UN in pursuit of
that goal.
The 17 remaining Non-Self-Governing Territories are: Western Sahara,
American Samoa, East Timor, Guam, New Caledonia, Pitcairn, Tokelau, Anguilla,
Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands/Malvinas,
Gibraltar, Montserrat, St. Helena, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the United
States Virgin Islands. |
