The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945. Currently made up of 193 Member States, the UN and its work are guided by the purposes and principles contained in its founding Charter.The UN has evolved over the years to keep pace with a rapidly changing world.But one thing has stayed the same: it remains the one place on Earth where all the world’s nations can gather together, discuss common problems, and find shared solutions that benefit all of humanity.The United Nations itself is one part of the UN System. Cooperation between the UN and the other entities of the UN system is essential in order to achieve the purposes of the Organizationlaid out in the UN Charter.Since its Charter was written, the United Nations has been mandated to do new work which was not envisioned at the time of its creation. The Organization has set goals to build a more sustainable world, and it has agreed to collective action to slow down climate change.As the problems facing humanity have grown, the work of the United Nations has also grown.
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The Secretary-General said that while the process of globalization has brought people together in one sense, in another it has driven people apart by not sharing the benefits and burdens and thus accentuating disparities in wealth and power.”This makes a mockery of universal values. It is not surprising that, in the backlash, those values have come under attack, at the very moment when we most need them,” he said.Mr. Annan said that the men who attacked targets in the United States on 11 September 2001 must not be allowed to provoke a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West – “as if Islamic and Western values were incompatible.”He said anyone who sincerely believes in individual rights should also support the right of people to not have to dissociate themselves from their co-religionists or ethnic kin.”Muslims, for example, should not be reviled or persecuted because they identify with Palestinians or Iraqis or Chechens, whatever one thinks of the national claims and grievances of those peoples, or the methods used in their name.”And no matter how strongly some of us may feel about the actions of the state of Israel, we should always show respect for the right of Israeli Jews to live in safety within the borders of their own state, and for the right of Jews everywhere to cherish that state as an expression of their national identity and survival.