Press Briefing to launch the Human Development Report 2004 "Cultural Liberty in Today's Diverse World"

VIENNA, 12 July 2004 - On the occasion of the publication of the Human Development Report 2004 on Thursday, 15 July in Brussels, UNIS Vienna organised a pre-launch press event of the Report at the Austrian Journalists Club in Vienna in collaboration with the Austrian Development Cooperation. The Report was introduced by Gabriele Köhler, a senior expert of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) together with Ambassador Georg Lennkh, head of the Austrian Development Cooperation. The event was moderated by Janos Tisovszky of UNIS.

As an introduction, Ms. Köhler gave a short overview of the general intentions of the Human Development Report and then continued by explaining the main focus of this years Report, examining cultural liberty as a key issue of human development. She emphasised the importance of this theme in order to uncover the multiple interconnections of cultural discrimination and economic underdevelopment which were often underestimated, in her opinion. She said it was necessary to concentrate today on a more general concept of culture as a choice of identity and as a way of being.

Ms. Köhler expressed the authors' opinion that quality of life could not be measured simply by calculating the per capita income and that, on the other hand, poverty did not simply mean the lack of money but more a lack of choice. She said that some of the main analytic questions considered by the Report were the growing complexity of how individuals identify themselves, the heterogeneity of modern societies and the rejection of repressive and conservative conventions, customs and traditions.

Apart from the analytical approaches, the report examined different political strategies of maintaining peoples right to exercise their ethnic, linguistic and religious identities. These ranged from policies of moderation in multicultural societies to innovative language-policies, ways to deal with racist and fundamentalist tendencies and ideas of connecting cultural and economic prosperity.

Ambassador Lennkh spoke in turn about the complexity of culture and cultural liberty today. He was critical of dealing with the concept of culture from a conflict-centered point of view and portraying culture as one of the main reasons for violent conflicts. He argued that culture was an enormously wide term and that cultural gaps were per se hardly ever to be bridged completely. He pointed out that in most cases, violent conflicts were due to political instrumentation of cultural prejudice rather than simply a difference in cultural approaches.

He stressed that his organization, the Austrian Development Cooperation, has been looking at culture in the past few years from a practical development angle. In that context, he highlighted the enormous achievement of the UNDP to establish a new yardstick of human development by the publication of the Report and the Human Development Index, which were more than simply a comparison in economic data. But, concluding his speech, he also said that primary development goals were far from being accomplished and he predicted the necessity of having to deal with these major problems in the near future. 

The event was followed by a question-and-answer session. In response to the question how the role of religion concerning the so-called "clash of cultures" was dealt with in the Report, Ms. Köhler emphasised the growing attention of the UN towards matters of religion and together with Ambassador Lennkh, she also highlighted the complexities of the relation between religious and ideological beliefs and the respect for human rights.

The event was attended by 20 representatives of major local print- and broadcast-media along with several important NGO's.

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