US Mission Geneva

“I want to begin by thanking my predecessor, Secretary Clinton, and I want to thank her entire team. They tirelessly advocated the values of our country and pushed for the accomplishment of any number of things to advance the interests of our nation.”

Protecting and advancing the rights of women are critical to solving virtually every challenge we face as individual nations and as a community of nations.

Hillary Rodham Clinton says that in her four years as U.S. secretary of state, she and President Obama have tried to promote a world where more nations take greater responsibility for shaping their futures

The United States recognizes the vital importance of providing early and unearmarked contributions to allow UNHCR the flexibility to ensure that critical protection and assistance activities for its beneficiary populations are not interrupted. We encourage other donors to join us in providing UNHCR with strong financial support.

WHO members are meeting in Geneva Dec 6-7 for an Extraordinary Meeting of the Program Budget and Administration Committee.

We need to make sure we have that mindset as we go into this conference and think about what we’re trying to advocate, as we think about who are the three constituencies we have for the telecom and the internet sectors. Number one, it’s citizens. The internet provides an incredibly valuable service to allow people to gain access to information, to share their points of view, and to fundamentally create a vibrant democracy with, again, two-way sharing of information. Number two, consumers benefit from all of this by being able to transact, by entrepreneurs being able to create new services, local for their environment. We create commercial opportunities. And then most importantly, societies have benefited. Economic growth has been directly correlated to internet access and continuing to drive that is important.

The U.S. calls upon both the parties to resume direct talks without preconditions on all the issues that divide them. And we pledge that the United States will be there to support the parties vigorously in such efforts.

In December 2009, the United States delegation came to the SCCR and said that we had concluded that it was the time to fashion new norms in International copyright to address what we believe is a legitimate concern, the book famine – the unjustifiable lack of availability of special format copies for visually impaired persons and for persons with print disabilities — throughout the world. We believe that the book famine exists and we believe our work here can go a substantial way – not all the way – to addressing the problem.

The U.S. pledges additional funding for aid effort, urgently calls on all parties to allow aid to reach Syrians most in need.