Pakistan underscores need to tackle external debt issue

Pakistan has called for the establishment of a multilateral legal framework for sovereign debt restructuring aimed at tackling the debt issue and gearing the financial system and its institutions towards helping countries emerge from crises.
Such a move would be an "important milestone" for ensuring debt sustainability, Ambassador Masood Khan, Pakistan's permanent representative to the UN, told the General Assembly's Second Committee, which deals with economic and financial questions.
Speaking in the general debate, the Pakistani envoy said the main weakness of the struggling global economy continued to be sovereign debt distress, fragile banking sector, weak aggregate demand and high unemployment. "We need to promote greater mobilisation of resources and generate investments for building productive capacities and resilience in the developing countries," he said.
At the start of his speech, Masood Khan said the current session was "the most momentous" for many years, because the Second Committee was charged with crafting the post-2015 development agenda and fulfilling the processes initiated at the Rio+20 Conference. While aiming to set a transformative agenda, states did not need to "reinvent the wheel". Rather, cumulative experiences and collective wisdom needed bringing to bear, and the new agenda should build on past successes and lessons learned.
The Millennium Development Goals, he said, had changed global discourse, but their work was far from done. Where they had fallen short, they did so because of a lack of resources. This time, resources had to be commensurate with the mandates given. The Monterrey Consensus had outlined policy actions needed to achieve the goals, and it was important to assess shortfalls fairly and agree on actions needed to implement the sustainable development goals if the Third Conference on Financing for Development was to be successful.
The Pakistani envoy said that eradication of poverty, inclusive and sustained economic growth and sustainable development had moved to the centre of this new agenda. Noting that the post-2015 development agenda will address the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, he warned that those goals would not be achieved without putting equal emphasis on peace and stability, democratic governance, the rule of law, access to justice, human rights, gender parity and, above all, institution building.
While noting that climate change poses serious challenges and demands urgent global action, Ambassador Khan emphasised that it was absolutely necessary that political commitments made by world leaders at the Climate Summit, were transformed into a global climate agreement in 2015. He, however, alerted that climate action should not undermine growth and development objectives of the developing countries.