Trip to New York
64th session of the United Nations General Assembly (21-23 September 2009)
This is the longest official trip since the election of Nicolas Sarkozy. One year after their first visit to the USA, the presidential couple set itself a very tight schedule during these five days in the USA: three days in New York for the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly, then two days in Pittsburgh for the G20 summit. Monday, 21 September: the couple arrived in New York at 6 pm (midnight in Paris). Bilateral talks between the French President and the Chinese President Hu Jintao were scheduled two hours later at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Before that, Nicolas Sarkozy greeted participants in a private ceremony paying tribute to his wife’s action in the fight against AIDS: the Global Fund had gathered its most fervent supporters from US business and media circles around its Ambassador.
The next day at the UN, the climate summit and, on Wednesday, the opening of the UN General Assembly. More than 120 heads of state had travelled to New York to attend this 64th session. The main novelty compared to the 63rd session was the presence of Barack Obama, the new Democratic President at the head of the United States. For Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, nine months after her appointment as “Global Ambassador for the Protection of Mothers and Children against AIDS,” this great annual UN meeting is a baptism of fire – the first time she has ever addressed an international meeting. Before joining Michelle Obama in Pittsburgh, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy made her new responsibilities the central focus of her stay in New York: contacts for her Foundation and an address at the UN calling on governments to act in favour of HIV-positive pregnant women: “Around the world only a third of women living with HIV receive the necessary treatment to prevent them transmitting the virus to their children. Isn’t it an immense injustice, when treatment exists, when no baby needs to be born with HIV?
With Tony Parker having recently awarded the Par Cœur trophy in Paris to the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation, the first lady is establishing a host of contacts in the United States, where the Foundation is recognised as a charity thanks to its partnership with the Fondation de France. Well-known philanthropists came to meet the first lady of France with the aim of helping her build up the Foundation that bears her name. Private foundations in the USA have for many years played a crucial role in guaranteeing access to education and culture for disadvantaged people, which is also the central goal of the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation.
Address to the UN (23 September 2009)
“I am simply an ambassador for these frightened women.” On Wednesday September 23, 2009, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy addressed a meeting in a room on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
One of her missions as Ambassador for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS is to prevent transmission of the virus from mother to child. (For the Global Fund, protection of mothers and children against HIV is essential to the efforts made to reach the health goals included in the Millennium Development Goals. These international goals were adopted by the United Nations in 2000 and include considerable improvement in maternal and child health as well as the containment and reversal of the AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria epidemics.) Accompanied by Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, and Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS, she launched an appeal to world leaders to eliminate mother to child transmission of HIV by 2015.
Nicolas Sarkozy was present, along with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and no less than 12 ministers. Ten first ladies, many of them from African countries ravaged by the epidemic, were present to bear witness to their engagement. Blaise Campaoré, President of Burkina Faso, and Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, together chaired this meeting described as “historic” – this is the first time that the issue of mother to child transmission has been placed at the top of the political agenda. “The efforts made by all countries, both in the North and in the South, have made it possible to give hope to millions of people. Today, more than four million people are receiving treatment for AIDS in the developing countries, whereas almost none of them were being treated five years ago,” noted Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, before addressing her audience more directly: “You are the leaders of the world and it is not my place to tell you what to do. But I can perhaps give you some advice: listen to the appeal we are launching today with the Global Fund, UNICEF and UNAIDS. In the next 18 months, we can double the number of HIV-positive women receiving treatment. By 2015, we could eliminate any transmission of the virus from mother to child.”
She then handed the microphone to Cristina Rodriguez, a Brooklyn teenager infected by the virus at birth by parents who did not know they were HIV-positive. Cristina’s emotion was even greater in that she was speaking in the name of Karen Gonzales, a young woman from Honduras who is also HIV-positive and who was originally scheduled to address the meeting. But the day that the young activist was supposed to fly to New York and meet Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, she had to abandon her trip due to the curfew imposed in her country.
