A pledge to meet the challenge of globalisation and to reduce poverty and the threat of war were key elements in the Millennium Summit Declaration which was adopted by world leaders meeting at UN headquarters last night.
"We will spare no effort to free and government.
"We will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected," the document said.
All but four of the 189 member-states took part in the summit, and 147 of them were represented at the highest level. While they did not agree on all the solutions, there was considerable consensus on many of the problems, including how to deal with the process of economic and technological globalisation which transcends national barriers and boundaries.
"We believe that the central challenge we face today is to ensure that globalisation becomes a positive force for all the world's poor," the declaration said.
It pledged to meet targets set out in advance of the summit by the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan: "We resolve . . . to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
"We resolve . . . to have, by then, halted, and begun to reverse, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the scourge of malaria and other major diseases that afflict humanity.
"We resolve . . . to provide special assistance to children orphaned by HIV/AIDS."
The declaration continued: "We solemnly reaffirm, on this historic occasion, that the United Nations is the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realise our universal aspirations for peace, co-operation and development. We, therefore, pledge our unstinting support for these common objectives, and our determination to achieve them." The UN will spell out "Thank You New York" in lights at its headquarters in New York City tomorrow and Monday night as a gesture of thanks to the city for hosting the Millennium Summit.
As the summit drew to a close, it heard a sharp attack by President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe on "former imperialist quarters" who had criticised his land reform programme. He said the black majority in his country was "congested on barren land" and that 70 per cent of the best arable land was owned by the 1 per cent of Zimbabwe's population who are white.
The Indian prime minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, accused the major powers of hypocrisy in seeking to deny his country its nuclear arsenal.
"India was forced to acquire these weapons in 1998 because the principal nuclear weapons states refused to accept the almost universal demand for disarmament," he said.
