The head of the United Nations was in Ottawa on this date in 2004 for meetings with Prime Minister Paul Martin. Kofi Annan, who had served as the UN’s Secretary General since 1997, also delivered an address to a joint session of Canada’s Parliament.
“I applaud Canada's focus on the rights and the dignity of the individual, an approach that has helped alter the terms of the debate on intervention and sovereignty in a creative and promising way,” Annan told MPs and Senators. “The individual is the basis on which every free democratic society is built.”
“As a result, we increasingly conceive of sovereignty as involving the responsibility of states, in the first instance, to protect their own populations,” he continued. “When that protection is lacking or the government concerned is unable or unwilling to do it, all of us in the international community share the responsibility to protect our fellow human beings from massive and systematic violations of human rights wherever and whenever they occur.”
You can read Annan’s entire address at this link: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/37-3/house/sitting-22/hansard
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.