Regarding his participation in the annual hearing coordinated by the Interparliamentary Union and the United Nations, González Patricio acknowledged, in an interview with Prensa Latina, the need to maintain that desire ten years after the proclamation of the region as a Zone of Peace.
Participants in the meeting, held during the last two days at the United Nations, agreed that the path to stability demands not only the end of conflicts, but also a long-term vision to eradicate and prevent them, he said.
“The lack of peace is not only the absence of wars,” said the Cuban lawmaker, adding that in order to achieve lasting and sustainable peace, it is necessary to resolve many other issues and conflicts both “within and between nations.”
The parliamentarian considered this a useful perspective, focused on resolving the causes that generate these conflicts and can endanger peace.
The annual parliamentary hearing was held under the motto “Ending conflicts: a recipe for a future of peace,” and consisted of panels that discussed the new UN agenda for that global desire, disarmament, climate change and the participation of women and young people.
In the opinion of the head of PARLATINO, although these challenges are part of the stances of a good deal of assemblies and governments in Latin America and the Caribbean, the panorama is different in the world.
We still find an international system where a group of States maintain their excessive production of weapons, with high environmental costs, not only when they are misused, but in the production itself, he added.
This is one of the aspects that is being handled when establishing the relationship between peace and the environment, he warned.
Other topics on the meeting’s agenda focused on the analysis on the need to democratize the UN Security Council and relations among countries, a long-standing debate strongly taken up by the United Nations on the path towards a fairer international order.
“For the Latin American and Caribbean Parliament it is not just about an institution, but about democratizing international relations. That is, achieving as a principle that democracy must be taken beyond national borders and reaching relations between national and international organizations,” he remarked.
According to González Patricio, the diversity of opinions in the audience was useful to map the political perspectives in the world’s parliaments around the issues in question.
The PARLATINO, in addition to ratifying his commitment to peace, has some proposals to make such as resuming democracy as a principle in relations among nations, valid even for international organizations.
In particular, the regional legislative body proposed that Democracy Day, celebrated every September 15, dedicate its international day in 2025 to democracy and international relations.
The Latin American and Caribbean Parliament celebrates its 60th anniversary this year.
The organization is made up of national parliaments from the region with the objective of defending democracy, Latin American integration, non-intervention and the peoples’ self-determination to choose the political, economic and social system that they freely decide, among others.
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