60th anniversary year kicks off with lecture at top London university

Around 150 diplomats, businesspeople, academics, students and NGO representatives attended the first in a series of three lectures jointly organised by the Commonwealth Secretariat and University College London (UCL) on Wednesday, 21 January 2009.

Professor Ngaire Woods from the Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford spoke of the urgency for the dramatic reform of global financial institutions, stressing that new rules were not enough.

Professor Richard Bellamy, founding head of UCL’s Department of Political Science, posed the question of whether global citizenship could – or should – replace national citizenship, and UCL’s Dr David Hudson examined recent calls for increased regulation of international institutions and asked whether the 1930s/1940s have any economic or political lessons to teach us during the current financial crisis.

Introducing the lecture, Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma said the principles of international governance have to include transparency and inclusiveness. “Everybody has rights and expectations,” he stressed.

Mr Sharma said it was a great pleasure to be associated with UCL – an institution created with the right of free-thinking.

The ‘Global Citizenship’ lecture series marks a new partnership between the two organisations – reflecting the Commonwealth’s work in the areas of democracy and development, and UCL’s research interests.

The subsequent lectures in the series will be:

- ‘Development Policies for a Changing World’, 31 March 2009, with Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General Ransford Smith and Professor Orazio Attanasio (a UCL academic and Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies).

- ‘Civil Paths to Peace’, 2 June 2009, with Professor Amartya Sen, Harvard University’s Nobel Prize-winning economist and chair of the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding.

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