They will also increasingly determine the nature of globalised economic institutions such as the WTO and the IMF and World Bank.

Secondly, there is now substantial momentum in developed countries to take steps to reduce CO2 emissions to address global warming. The West – probably including the United States after the next US election – believes the world should set binding global targets for reducing CO2 emissions.

Developing countries see the problem but their agenda for change is different. They need to lift their people out of poverty first and foremost; the West has already done that. So major developing countries will only agree to a new convention to reduce CO2 emissions if they have scope to increase living standards. That makes for a tough negotiation. India, China and others will dictate the terms of that agreement as much as the United States and the European Union.

That’s part of the new world we are living in.

The other great change to the global power balance has been the emergence of asymmetrical threats to conventional and powerful states. The challenge by Islamic extremists to democracy and modernity through the use of the weapon of terrorism often conducted by suicide bombers is a case in point. Opponents of the West and its ideology know they cannot challenge the might of America militarily. They choose alternative methods to strike fear into the hearts of the American people and to try to get them, a fearful public, to force America, Britain and others to change their policies.

I want you to know that I think there is no political or religious cause which justifies terrorism. There is a false and foolish and evil saying that today’s terrorist is tomorrow’s freedom fighter. Today’s terrorist is today’s and tomorrow’s murderer. No cause is so great that it justifies deliberately murdering innocent men, women and, in particular, children. As you know here in Sri Lanka, if those who use terror as a tool of politics think they can win ,they will continue the struggle. If they are persuaded they can never win, eventually they will lose enthusiasm for the cause. All decent people must vigorously oppose terrorism as a tool of politics.

But for a long time they will challenge conventional power with alternative tools and that represents a new challenge for the world.

In an era of such breathtaking change, statesmen need to review and re-evaluate constantly their own national institutions as well as the global institutions which form the backbone of what we call multilateral diplomacy.

At the heart of multilateral diplomacy is the institution I now work for – the United Nations.

Set up as the horror of the Second World War was drawing to a close, the United Nations was the child of idealists like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. They wanted to end war forever. New international laws would be written, the rights of individuals would be drawn up and promoted, the dignity of humankind would be underwritten by generous aid programs and the peoples of the world would be able to determine their own destinies not have their destinies determined by other far distant rulers.

For the global public, all that seems today a far off dream when they contemplate the conflicts and poverty which seem to envelop the world.

Yet the truth is somewhat different. The vision of the founding fathers of the United Nations has at least partially been realised. Poverty as a proportion of humanity has been reduced significantly over the last half century; there are almost no inter-state conflicts – although there are many arguments and there are tolerable tensions between states – and the numbers killed in conflict are well below the numbers suffered in the 1950s. Progress is being made. Even the new challenges we face today such as terrorism, climate change and environmental degradation are being addressed and in some places addressed well.

This is not a case for being complacent about the work and work methods of the United Nations. Quite the contrary. The global community supports the ideals of the United Nations and it wills it to succeed. To succeed, the United Nations, like all institutions which are effective, needs to evolve with the times.

First, let me go to the heart of the United Nations, the Security Council. The five permanent members of the Security Council were the five major winners of the Second World War. Without their presence on the Security Council and without them being given vetoes over Security Council decisions, I doubt the United Nations would have come into existence at all.

Yet those vetoes, or at least the threat of the veto, have often paralysed the United Nations at moments when the world has looked on in horror and wanted the UN to end the violence. It failed in Rwanda, in Somalia and in the Balkans, it failed for some time in Darfur and many look for a more active UN to address the problems of Myanmar and North Korea. These failures have made the global community angry and disillusioned with the UN. A theme has emerged that multi-lateral diplomacy is nothing more than the plaything of naive idealists who have no answer to the problems of the world. I personally don’t share that view, but I understand it.

Some believe the solution is to get those privileged to have vetoes give them up. Global, multi-lateral politics needs to be democratised. No country is so exceptional that it can veto action to stop cruelty.

To be frank, any suggestion that those five countries with vetoes should give them up is fanciful. Imagine Gordon Brown or Nicholas Sarkozy going to their next elections promising to surrender their vetoes on the Security Council and hoping to be re-elected! In any case, the permanent members of the Security Council all argue with some passion that they use their vetoes infrequently and that is true. The threat of the veto, whether it is asserted or implied, is often the real issue.

This issue needs to be addressed because when the world is faced with a human catastrophe, including manmade catastrophes, it expects the UN to fix the problem.

There are several ways to address this. First and foremost, the Security Council must be reformed. The permanent membership of the Security Council needs to reflect the new world in which we live, not one we have long left behind. With a billion inhabitants and a fast growing economy, India deserves to be a permanent member. So does Japan - which, by the way, is the second largest contributor to the UN. There is a case for each major region of the world having one permanent member of the Security Council. If that is so, then one of the Latin American countries, probably Brazil should be a permanent member.

Some say that according to this argument, Africa must have a permanent member and it should be South Africa.

Others say Germany too should be a permanent member by virtue of its economic weight and influence but it suffers from its membership overloading the representation of the European Union. Indeed, I have listened with wry amusement to UN officials arguing that Britain and France should surrender their permanent seats on the Security Council to the European Union. An interesting idea from those who cannot see politically reality through the trees of neat theoretical symmetry.

If the Security Council’s permanent membership were expanded by, say, four, some argue logically that the new four should have the same rights as the old five. Think about this carefully. There is a clear symmetry to that argument as well but nine vetoes is a big hurdle for the UN to overcome when five is already causing it problems with decision making. If new permanent members were to be given a veto then the Security Council would be less likely to make decisions than it is today. On the basis of functionality, none of the new permanent members could be given a veto.

So far, attempts to reform the Security Council have failed but that is not an argument for giving up. If the United Nations is to be a modern and relevant institution it must reflect the age in which we live. The objections to the new permanent membership are inevitable; Pakistan doesn’t want India, and is able to assemble a coterie of supporters for their cause. The Latin Americans cannot agree on which country is the most significant in the region and it is hardly a secret that China has reservations about its next door neighbour and historic rival Japan being a member.

I am sure all these arguments have some merit but by stopping reform, the conservatives are limiting the capacity and credibility of the United Nations.

Reform of the Security Council, if it were to happen at all, would certainly not be some global panacea to all the world’s problems. There is a lot more to do. The United Nations and the international community more broadly, has to build up the legal capacity to intervene in the interests of humanity when people are suffering from genocide and mass murder. We cannot just sit by again and watch on our TV screens people being massacred as they were in the Balkans or Rwanda. I don’t go to the movies very often but I did see a film called Hotel Rwanda about UN insouciance as 800,000 people were murdered.

In my time as foreign minister of Australia there was one dramatic occasion when we were able to get UN authorisation to intervene militarily to save human lives; that was East Timor. When violence erupted in East Timor in early September 1999 , Australia and others begged the Indonesian President to allow a UN authorised peacekeeping force to intervene to restore order. We assembled the military means to do the job and then mounted a massive diplomatic campaign to get approval to do the job.

Simultaneously, we begged the five permanent members of the Security Council to authorise the peacekeeping force. Some, like Britain, were immediately supportive. The United States gradually came onside but China and Russia would not support any authorisation of a peacekeeping force without the ready agreement of the Indonesians. The Indonesian President did eventually agree, the peacekeeping force was authorised by the Security Council and we were able to stop the suffering of the East Timorese people.

In the same year, the Western powers wanted to intervene militarily to stop the murder which was taking place in Kosovo. Night after night Western television viewers were subjected to scenes of violence and brutality in central Europe. The Western public was demanding action to stop it.

The Russians would not agree to a Security Council resolution authorising NATO – predominantly the US and the UK – to send military forces to stop the violence.

In the age of instant media coverage of any crisis anywhere on earth, this put Western democracies in a difficult position. They could stick to the letter of international law and let the Kosovars suffer and face the wrath of their own electorates. Or they could, in effect, flout international law, intervene and win the applause of grateful voters.

In the end, as you know, they followed the instincts of their electorates and there were no legal consequences. Thousands of lives were saved but, technically, international law was flouted.

This episode weakened the authority and credibility of the UN because, as was so often the case in the past, the UN would not act to stop the killing.

If the UN is ever to become the true guardian of international peace and security, then the members of its Security Council will have to become more willing to authorise action to stop excessive violence. It was done, albeit a little slowly, in the case of East Timor. And when it wasn’t done in Kosovo, the UN was by-passed.

The UN is built on the foundations of national sovereignty. For many member states, national sovereignty is an absolute. Yet if the UN is to become truly effective, its members will have to recognise that in certain circumstances humanity is more important than sovereignty.

This has, in part, been already accepted by the adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005 of the doctrine of "responsibility to protect". At the heart of this doctrine is a simple proposition. All nations have national, sovereign rights but those rights bring with them responsibilities; responsibilities to look after their citizens’ welfare not murder them. Under the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, in certain egregious situations the international community can justify the transgression of a nation’s sovereignty. This is an important step forward but the ultimate test will come when the Security Council is required to take a real life decision, not just endorse a general principle.

And it still doesn’t answer the question of whether uninvited intervention without UN authorisation is ever justified. In some circumstances I think it is. Certain specific criteria have to be met, though. First, the situation has to be so extreme that a large number of lives would be lost without intervention. Secondly, those contemplating intervention should only do so if they are satisfied intervention, including military intervention, would make matters better, not worse. That is an important consideration. It is possible the presence of foreign troops, for example, could exacerbate not improve a situation.

Intervention need not, of course, be military. Diplomatic intervention can be effective and appropriate. Given its relative neutrality, the UN is ideally placed to play this role but individual countries and regional organisations can also be effective. SADC and in particular South Africa have directly intervened diplomatically in trying to solve the internal political crisis in Zimbabwe. They have been relatively successful, at least in recent times. You yourselves have seen Norway trying to resolve your own internal problems, although so far less successfully.

My overall point is this. We live in an age of mass communications where the public, wherever they are, watch unfolding dramas and catastrophes on their television sets night after night. When they see horrific violence such as we saw in the Balkans right in front of their noses, they demand action. Fifty or more years ago they would have been unaware of all but the most major of events. This change in the dynamic of public perceptions has to be dealt with.

The new doctrine of responsibility to protect is as much born out of the information and communications revolution as it is a response to natural compassion for human suffering.

Some in Sri Lanka may view the doctrine of responsibility to protect with suspicion. Is this just an excuse for uninvited international intervention in the conflict between the Sri Lankan Government and the LTTE? My answer to that is twofold. First, although the violence is disturbing in cannot by any stretch of the imagination be put in the same category as the mass killings and ethnic cleansing of the Balkans during the 1990s. The level of violence doesn’t meet the benchmark needed to justify dramatic international action.

Secondly, uncalled for intervention is not necessarily going to make matters better. This is the important second condition for intervention.

Mediators may be able to help but it would be a very special person who could come in from the outside world and fix your problems.

Reform of the Security Council and the evolution of the responsibility to protect are important changes needed to make the UN more effective.

It also needs to change other aspects of its structure. Over the last generation, there has been an explosion of new member states of the United Nations. While new states may have reflected the aspirations of peoples, the more members an organisation has, the harder it is to make decisions. That is why the current groupings of states needs to be re-engineered. The group system is a product of the Cold War. The West Europe and Others Group brings most European countries together with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. That does not make sense these days. Canada should be in an Americas Group and Australia and New Zealand in an East Asia Group.

The Asia Group should be split at least in two and the East Europe Group should now be abolished as it no longer has any meaning. Europe is slowly evolving into a tightly knit club if not a single political entity. This sounds like a technical change to electoral groups but it is important because the current group system causes there to be an over-representation of Europe at the expense of Asia. That in turn only compounds the anachronistic structure of the UN and in particular, the Security Council. Under the present group system, the European Union can have up to one third of the membership of the Security Council, with two vetoes. That is just not appropriate.

The UN also needs to reform its administrative procedures. As an employee of the United Nations I can confirm that, to be polite, its administrative characteristics fall well short of world’s best practice. That is because member states try to micro-manage the administration of the organisation through the so-called fifth committee of the General Assembly. The Secretary General, not the member states should administer the organisation. As the system stands at the moment , movements of staff and budgets to address emerging issues are strangled by the micro-managers of the member states.

Now for some of you these issues must sound a little esoteric. My point is, they are not. They are central to the United Nations being able to live up to the expectations of the global community particularly in the task of trying to resolve conflicts and stop emerging conflicts.

We are all very conscious of the dramatic changes which have taken place since I first came to your beautiful country. Some of them are welcome, some are not. But nearly all of them are dramatic. The world I saw from the deck of the P & O liner which brought my family to Sri Lanka would hardly be recognisable today, yet I am still in my fifties. The point is, our global institutions need to evolve as needs and times change. Sadly, the membership of the UN has been reluctant to embrace reform with the necessary vigour To guarantee the UN can live up to expectations.

Lakshman Kadirgamar would have liked to see the UN take on the issue of terrorism more vigorously than it has. After all, the UN cannot even agree on a definition of terrorism.

But we should not despair. We should, all of us as an international community, work to build better institutions to make our world a safer and more prosperous place.