WARNING that the United Nations system is "under threat", the President, Mrs Robinson, issued a stirring call last night for its revitalisation.
Accepting the Global Leadership Award of the UN Association of New York, Mrs Robinson said that "above all we need a more effective and vigorous United Nations which will again seize the initiative, as it has done in the past, in the struggle for a world which is at peace and where all peoples and nations, large and small, are firmly on the road to economic and social progress."
The President, who earlier met the UN Secretary General, Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, at a reception, warned that the UN system and its multilateral approach were under threat.
"The current financial crisis is draining away the energy and resources needed to face the tasks ahead. Confidence in the capacity of the organisation to deal effectively with the menace of new types of ethnic and intra-state conflict has been undermined."
The President said that despite decades of effort and resources "we are still losing the war on poverty." We spent more on armaments than on aid, and "human rights and democratic freedoms are still denied to millions".
The struggle for the social emancipation and empowerment of women throughout the world has not yet begun in earnest.
And "the very survival of the human community and our planet continues to be in danger from global threats to the environment."
President Robinson said that in view of this she failed to understand how anyone could suggest that the UN "has no effective role to play". More than ever before "we need the multilateral approach which the United Nations embodies."
At the same time "we have to adapt and revitalise the United Nations so that it can better serve the ideals for which it was founded peace, justice and development for all nations." The vision of the founders of the UN "must be matched in our time by a renewed vision and political commitment which will sustain and enhance the unique role of the United Nations system as an instrument of multilateral action".
Accepting that the "process of adaptation and reform is already under way" Mrs Robinson said that a "sense of urgency is necessary if we are to regain the initiative and restore confidence in the United Nations system as a decisive global instrument for real progress.
She said she believed that "fresh priorities for action needed to be set, particularly in the areas of economic and social development. But there must also be a more co-ordinated approach to peacekeeping. "We must go further than maintaining the peace. We must also make the peace.
The President said that "more focus is required on preventive work, on tackling the roots of conflict, poverty, disease, famine and deprivation of basic human rights and freedoms."
If the United Nations could make a real impact on sustainable development through a more vigorous and co-ordinated effort, sustained by the political will of all the member states, it would have gone a long way to win back the confidence of the international community.
She concluded by paying tribute to the "tireless work of development and relief" being played by non governmental organisations (NGOs). Where there were 41 NGOs present at the UN founding conference in San Francisco in 1945, there are now nearly 1,000.
"It is NGOs who articulate individual concerns, persuasively and vividly, who are global advocates and who strive ceaselessly to remind us to honour our stated commitments and to settle for nothing less," the President said.