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2002, Switzerland was the 190th State to join the UN. What are the conclusions and perspectives ten years later?
Dossier
From May 2011 to May 2014, Switzerland will be occupying a seat on the Executive Board of the World Health Organization (WHO). Switzerland is committed to a strengthening of both the WHO and of
national healthcare systems.
Switzerland on the Executive
Board
SDC cooperation with the UN
Increasingly, development and humanitarian challenges are being met on the global level with the UN and its bodies playing a central role. Switzerland is one of the most important donor countries of the UN and has been active in the main UN bodies since it became a member in 2002.
All UN
development cooperation activities are focused on achieving the Millennium Development Goals. These were adopted at the
Millennium Summit in 2000 and include such aims as reducing poverty around the world by half by 2015. The strengths of the United Nations are in the number of its members (192 countries), its
considerable political neutrality, its comprehenvis know-how and its presence practically everywhere in the world.
| The UN and Switzerland |
Switzerland has been a full member of the UN since September 2002. This enables it to introduce matters of a development policy nature into the core bodies (General Assembly, Economic and Social
Council) of the UN where the positions of the UN agencies and all international development cooperation take set. On the operative level, the SDC supports a limited number of around 30 UN development
funds and programmes. In 2010, the Swiss support amounted to CHF 170 million.
SDC multilateral cooperation with the UN has two priorities: development cooperation and humanitarian aid. The most important partners of the SDC are the United Nations Development
Programme, UNDP, the UN Population Fund, UNFPA and the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF. There is also important cooperation with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS, the World Food Programme, WFP and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs OCHA.
Cooperation with the UN enables Switzerland:
- to participate in global approaches to the solution of global problems,
- to participate in large-scale operations to prevent increasingly complex emergency situations and to combat them,
- to use its limited resources effectively through multilateral cooperation,
- to introduce its rich bilateral experience in shaping global development policy,
- to focus more closely on the poorest countries and poorest population groups by participating in UN activities,
- to show its solidarity with the victims of crises and catastrophes in coordination with UN organizations.
Additional Information and Documents
- L’accent multilatéral / septembre 2012 : ONU - dix ans au coeur du système
L’effort de cohérence
Download (PDF, 2659 KB) : [de] [fr] - Reform of the United Nations Development system
Factsheet
Download (PDF, 747 KB) : [de] [en] [fr] -
United Nations
http://www.un.org/ -
The UN works
http://www.un.org/works/ -
Switzerland and the United Nations
Informations on the Website of the FDFAhttp://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/topics/intorg/un.html - Swiss diplomat appointed to high level position in the UN System
- Swiss Delegation to participate in UN Session in New York on Violence against Women and Girls
- Fourth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC-IV)
- The Voice of Swiss Youth at the UN
- UN Global Compact Leaders Summit 2010, New York
- Creation of a new United Nations agency for women
- Reviewing the effectiveness of multilateral organisations
- ECOSOC 2006: Decent work for all