In this, my tenth and last annual report, I have sought to provide an overview of the Organization’s main achievements and challenges during the past 12 months in the light of the critical developments in the decade since I took office at the beginning of 1997...

...Over its lifetime the United Nations has changed from being principally a conference-servicing Organization to become a truly global service provider working on the ground in virtually every corner of the world to improve the lives of people who need help. This transformation has occurred in a dramatic way during the past decade....Human rights work at the country level has grown significantly; in 1996 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was present in 14 countries, and currently OHCHR-supported human rights personnel are deployed in over 40 countries ....In addition, the Millennium Development Goals have become an operational template for use by Governments and peoples around the world to advance the well-being of all. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS is leading the charge to combat existential threats ...by bringing together the efforts and resources of 10 United Nations system organizations to the global AIDS response, and the UNAIDS secretariat works on the ground in more than 75 countries.

If any one phenomenon can be said to have dominated the decade we have just lived through, it must surely be globalization.... While the United Nations is constituted by Member States...“non-State actors” ... form new global constituencies with which the United Nations is increasingly called upon to interact.

...The United Nations is having to learn how to work with global business and global civil society in all their manifold forms. The Organization must encourage partnerships with these vital actors to promote desirable changes and deliver growth, security and services, especially in the field. But while nation-States are no longer the sole players in international relations, they are still the most important...

Certainly, the State has not...become redundant.... The role of the State as... mediator between different interest groups becomes all the more important as society becomes more complex. The more deadly weapons proliferate, the more essential is the State’s monopoly on the means of coercion.

...Our founders conceived of the Organization as working mainly to preserve the peace between States. They even forbade the Organization...to intervene “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state”, though with the sensible reservation that this principle should not prejudice the application of enforcement measures...when the Security Council takes action with respect to threats to the peace...or acts of aggression.

In recent years the Council has made use of this reservation many times....Thus the United Nations comes increasingly to see the security of its Member States as inseparable from that of the populations who inhabit them and are represented by them. That is why the world’s heads of State and Government felt it necessary, at last year’s historic summit, to reaffirm that “each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”, and to affirm that the international community also has the responsibility to take timely and decisive action for this purpose... when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to do it.