On September 29, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan attended the 70th session of the UN General Assembly in New York, where he made the following address.

Distinguished President Lykketoft,

I congratulate you upon election to the honorable post of the President of the United Nations General Assembly. I am confident that under your able leadership this jubilee Session will meet expectations we all harbor.

Distinguished Delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I also congratulate all of us upon the 70th anniversary of the United Nations. The establishment of this Organization had been one of the greatest achievements of the humankind that consolidated nations around shared aspirations and principles. The past 70 years have been characterized by the most important positive developments – an end was put to colonialism, racial discrimination and apartheid. Many people around the world exercised their right to self-determination, got in charge of their own fate by establishing and building independent states of their own, thus increasing the number of the UN member States from 51 to 193.

Amid all these achievements, we shall recognize that currently the world faces new challenges such as terrorism, extremism, intolerance, economic crises, climate change, trafficking in human beings and their organs, as well as drugs and arms, migration crisis etc. The list enumerating these challenges is long. It is the very necessity to struggle against them that obliges us to resolutely reiterate our joint commitment to the mission of this Organization and its Charter.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Last year, on the eve of the Armenian Genocide Centennial, from this podium I expressed our gratitude to the nations that recognized the Armenian Genocide and named them all individually. I called upon the international community to bolster the struggle against the recurrence of the crime of genocide through recognition and condemnation.

Today, from this very podium, I thank Pope Francis, and acknowledge the historical Mass he celebrated; the European Parliament, and recall the Resolution it adopted; the German President, and, believe me, his well-known statement will thenceforth take part in the pages of our nation’s history textbooks. I thank the legislative bodies of Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, numerous provincial and city councils, as well as dozens and hundreds political and non-governmental organizations.

I thank the Presidents of Russia, France, Cyprus, and Serbia, as well as delegations of numerous other countries that on April 24 paid tribute to the victims of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan.

Our determination to keep the prevention of the crime of genocide on the international agenda is testified by the Resolutions we periodically table at the Human Rights Council, and the latest one to that effect was adopted this year. Building further upon it, just a few days ago this Assembly passed a resolution establishing December 9 as “the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime.”

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