International Conference |
Dear Mr. Minister, Ms. Assistant Director-General of UNESCO, your Excellency Mr. Ambassador, Ladies and Gentlemen, Conference participants and guests.
It is a great honor for me to welcome you today at this beautiful palace to the international conference UNESCO between two Phases of the World Summit on the Information Society on behalf of the Russian Federation Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Russian Federation Commission for UNESCO. Russia’s collaboration with UNESCO, which was traditionally one of the priorities of the Russian foreign policy, has been expanding dynamically over the last several years. The close attention towards UNESCO’s activities on the part of the Russian President indicates such increased interest; hence, the idea of holding a conference of this level here was supported and implemented.
I would like to express gratitude to Mr. Koïchiro Matsuura and to the UNESCO Secretariat for their valuable assistance in preparing the conference program. I would also like to thank the heads of the Russian ministries and authorities, City of Saint Petersburg Administration and Valentina I. Matvienko personally, and all the Russian and foreign partners for their attention and support in organizing this forum.
Controlling information and having instant access to it have always been the key success factors in all the spheres of human activity. This is precisely why, stated President Vladimir V. Putin in his welcome address, it is so important today to attract the attention of the whole global community to the humanitarian aspects of building the information space, to its legal, ethical, social, and cultural issues. This task is one of UNESCO’s central duties both during the preparatory process for the Summit and in general in its work under the conditions of increasingly globalized world and the new challenges requiring coordinated responses from the humankind.
Russia takes active part in the Summit’s work. Our initiatives concerning, primarily, the information security area are reflected in the Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action, which were adopted at the end of the first phase of the Summit in Geneva in 2003. As part of the UNESCO Information for All Programme, our country was facilitating the development of UNESCO’s fundamental documents in the sphere of information and communication, specifically, working on the Recommendation about Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace and the Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage. These international legal acts represented UNESCO’s contribution to the work of the World Summit on the Information Society.
Our crucial task at this time is to analyze the results of the first phase of the Summit and UNESCO’s role in this forum unprecedented in its importance, to make an assessment of the work completed in the post-Geneva period, and make recommendations that could be submitted by UNESCO for discussion at the second WSIS phase in Tunis.
I would like to wish you productive work and hope that the conference results will become another proof of the possibility of practical implementation of the international partnership strategy for the purposes of expanding universal access to the information, preserving cultural diversity, and building the global knowledge society.
Thank you for your attention.