The future of peace and prosperity that we seek for all the world's peoples needs a foundation of tolerance, security, equality and justice.

If the United Nations does not attempt to chart a course for the world's people in the first decades of the new millennium, who will?

These divisions in the international community - the Syrians bear quite a lot of the blame, but we have enabled it by the divisions between us.

Children are our future, and their mothers are its guardians.

To live is to choose.

You saw the traumas that people lived through, and wondered what it will take to move us as a human community, as humanity, to help in these dangerous situations.

For too long the development debate has ignored the fact that poverty tends to be characterized not only by material insufficiency but also by denial of rights. What is needed is a rights-based approach to development. Ensuring essential political, economic and social entitlements and human dignity for all people provides the rationale for policy. These are not a luxury affordable only to the rich and powerful but an indispensable component of national development efforts.