Sound choice in Dennis Francis
T&T has exercised good judgment in supporting the candidacy of Dennis Francis for the elevated post of President of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), a job he will assume T&T has chosen Dennis Francis to become President of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September. Francis has been given a one-year opportunity to preside over contentious sittings of the only organ of the UN comprising all 193 member states, and has the responsibility for approving the UN’s annual budget and setting the UNGA agenda. He is expected to have a vested interest in climate change, as well as the fate of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like T&T and those global financial and other systems that disadvantage developing nations. The T &T team congratulates Francis and wishes him well.
发表 : 2年前 经过 Express Editorial 在
T&T has exercised good judgment in supporting the candidacy of Dennis Francis for the elevated post of President of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), a job he will assume in September. At the tail-end of approximately 40 years of dutiful work in the foreign service, Mr Francis has been handed a one-year opportunity to preside over oftentimes contentious sittings of the only organ of the UN comprising all 193 member states.
It is no small opportunity and an enormous challenge. As UNGA president, Mr Francis has the consequential responsibility for approving the UN’s annual budget and setting the UNGA agenda. He will preside—like a speaker of the house—over a collection of nations with competing ideologies and agendas at a time of global political and economic uncertainty. In the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Mr Francis’s tenure “comes at a deeply challenging moment amidst conflicts, climate chaos and escalating poverty, hunger and inequality, while the UN’s sustainable development goals for 2030 are slipping out of reach”.
We expect Mr Francis to also have a vested interest in climate change, in particular the fate of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like T&T, and those global financial and other systems that disadvantage developing nations. In this focus, he will be advancing the UN’s effort to rebuild trust in and within the organisation.
Mr Francis’ long career and layered experiences in the T&T public service will serve him well in this new assignment. Though relatively unknown to the public, he has served under both PNM and UNC governments. At the time of his compulsory retirement in 2016, he was T&T’s longest serving ambassador.
His time in the T&T foreign service was not without setbacks. Notably, he served as ambassador and permanent representative to the UN in Geneva from 2006 to 2011 during which he was our automatic representative to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Human Rights Council. He performed similar duties in Vienna, liaising with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
Also during that period, Mr Francis was our permanent representative to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), while serving concurrently as non-resident Ambassador to Austria and Italy.
In a time when career diplomats are routinely sidelined in favour of political appointees inexperienced in the complexities of international relations, Mr Francis returned from that important positing in 2011 to make way, first, for the infamous tenure of political appointee, the People’s Partnership’s Therese Baptiste-Cornelis, and later the People’s National Movement (PNM)’s youth officer and Heliconia Foundation member, Makeda Antoine.
With this background, Mr Francis, we believe, is properly seized of the politically volatile environment in which he operates and capable of the much-needed depth and dignity in the representation of T&T on this large stage.
We congratulate him and wish him well.