Paris, May 15 {2000-49} - The 159th session of UNESCO's Executive Board, one of the Organization's two ruling bodies, was opened today by its Chairperson, Sonia Mendieta de Badaroux, who qualified as "historic" the meeting which will focus notably on the Director-General's reform programme for the Organization and which will include a thematic debate on UNESCO in a Globalising World.

Both the Chairperson of the 58-member Executive Board, which meets twice a year, and the Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura, stressed the urgent need for reform at the opening of the session, the first since both took office last November.

Ms Mendieta de Badaroux (Honduras) spoke of the World Education Forum which recently took place in Dakar, Senegal, and welcomed UNESCO's success in obtaining recognition for its leadership role in education: "During the Forum, the role of UNESCO was reaffirmed and its visibility in basic education for all was enhanced."

The Chairperson declared: "The World Education Forum was a conference of great scope and the entire world - especially developing countries - is placing its hopes in UNESCO and in its interlocutors so that education for all become a tangible reality as we enter the new millennium." She stressed that following up on Dakar will furnish the Organization with "an excellent opportunity to launch new initiatives and fulfil its mission at the vanguard of education."

After stressing that "the critical consequences of globalisation constitute one of the main challenges facing the Organization," Ms Mendieta de Badaroux spoke of the major subjects that will be addressed by the 159th session, notably the reform of the Organization. She expressed her gratitude to the Director-General for all that has already been achieved in this context and said: "This is a process in the making, but one can already feel the winds of change sweeping through the Organization, both with regard to budgetary matters and staff policy and management."

The Chairperson of the Board recalled that the thematic debate on UNESCO in a Globalising World will be held on May 17. Jean-Claude Trichet, Governor of France's central bank; Kuwaiti writer Mohammed Al Rumaihi; and the President of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, Luc Montagnier, will take part in the debate. The Dakar Forum will be the subject of a debate on the morning of May 25.

The Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura, stressed that the reforms underway at UNESCO "do not aim to improve the management of the Organization for the satisfaction that this may bring in its own right, but to redesign the Organization to meet its original mission […], [to become] a veritable 'knowledge-organisation,' capable of developing innovative strategies to meet contemporary challenges."

Mr Matsuura said that "the credibility of UNESCO has been affected by difficulties in adapting its strategic vision to the pace of change in today's world." He spoke of intangible heritage - an essential challenge for the preservation of cultural diversity - as an example of this, saying that too little attention has been paid to intangible heritage although it is "one of the most urgent questions at the time of globalisation, in view of the danger of uniformisation and acculturation that it can engender." He also stressed that "the Organization has not yet taken the full measure of the radically new factors introduced by the development of the information society and by the new technologies. Their potential to extend the reach of basic education, especially in favour of excluded and underprivileged groups, to enrich the quality of the educational process, to improve access to scientific knowledge and facilitate intercultural interaction, have certainly not been sufficiently exploited."

The Director-General also spoke about the success of the World Education Forum where UNESCO acquired "not only a bolstered mandate but a responsibility of the first order" because it has been able to showcase its unique profile: its "capacity to mobilise both the political will of governments and the commitment of civil society." He added: "It is my ambition to turn UNESCO into an unchallenged reference, I would even say into an intellectual, strategic and ethical authority in all the fields pertaining to its competence. To this end, UNESCO must first reorganise as a world centre listening to, collecting, assessing and re-disseminating knowledge and experience available around the world, backed-up and documented to meet the highest standards of quality and professionalism."

He said: "It is absolutely clear in my mind that the new UNESCO will only become a reality with the sustained and high level political commitment of you, the Organization's Member States, to the platform of reform on which you elected me." After stressing that the reform called for is far-reaching and radical, requiring considerable sacrifice, Mr Matsuura explained he was working "under severe constraints, mainly financial". He said that the pace at which changes would be implemented would also depend on the resources made available to the Organization.