39. Calls on the General Conference to guarantee transparency of cultural policies, the right to freedom of information, freedom of opinion, intellectual property, the protection of fundamental rights and cultural human rights, and the democratic principle;

41. Calls on the General Conference of UNESCO to devise procedures, policies and programmes to permit access to culture and the development of cultural policy, in order to permit countries, particularly developing countries, to produce and distribute their own cultural goods and services;

29. Considers the Convention on cultural diversity, as agreed by UNESCO's General Conference, as a means of bringing cultural policies to the fore and to ensure on a global scale the protection and promotion of diversity of cultural contents and artistic forms of expression, which appear to be particularly threatened by globalisation;

The salient points on the social side concerned the contexts of: employment, where -the priority given in national policies to the creation of jobs and on the role of employment as an essential factor of integration were stressed; -the summit also gave prominence to the promotion of the fundamental rights and interests of workers through respect of the ILO Conventions on the banning of forced and child labour, the freedom of workers to organise and bargain collectively and the principle of non-discrimination; -in addition, the countries represented were urged to encourage the establishment of employer/employee relations in their national legislations; poverty, for which: - the structural causes were recognised along with the need for a m ...[+++]ulti- dimensional approach involving the poor themselves; - a commitment was received from all the countries to announce as soon as possible national plans to reduce all forms of poverty and to eradicate absolute poverty; prevention of exclusion, for which: - the role and importance of society in general in the preparation, implementation and monitoring of social policy were acknowledged; - the need for access for everyone to basic social services such as health care and education was recognised; equal opportunities for men and women, where: - the role and importance of the involvement of women in social, political, cultural and economic life were highlighted as part of the lead-up to the fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing; human rights, where: - respect for all human rights and for democracy as essential elements in development were explicitly and unequivocally acknowledged.

I was part of the Working Group on Cultural Policy for the 21st Century, organized by the Canadian Conference of the Arts, and that group recommended—and I can condense this—that the Minister of Canadian Heritage, the Honourable Sheila Copps, continue her efforts to develop broad international consensus with governments of our international partners to adopt measures to affirm cultural sovereignty in Canada and beyond, to secure cu ...[+++]ltural pluralism in a globalized world, and to harness the powers of new technologies as tools.

Coming back to cultural policy, I think that the Canadian Conference of the Arts has put the issue of a national cultural policy on the table.