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ROMULO SIGNS TWO KEY UN AGREEMENTS
25 September 2007, United Nations, New York – Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto G. Romulo signed on behalf of the Philippines two key agreements at the United Nations today -- the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Convention on the Use of Electronic Communications in International Contracts.
In signing the Convention on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities, Secretary Romulo said that the norms in this
Convention reflect the commitment of the
Countries that join in the Convention engage themselves to develop and carry out policies, laws and administrative measures for securing the rights recognized in the Convention and abolish laws, regulations, customs and practices that constitute discrimination.
The Secretary pointed out that the Convention is not asking for any new rights for persons with disabilities. It is not asking for anything that other people don’t already enjoy already. What it is asking, Secretary Romulo said, “is that persons with disabilities enjoy the same opportunities in society that everybody else already enjoys.”
Secretary Romulo also noted that the Convention was adopted by the General Assembly last December after only three years of negotiations and said that it is one of the fastest negotiated treaties in the history of the UN.
On the Convention on the Use of Electronic Communications in International Contracts, Secretary Romulo said that as a country with an economy that is growing and that is closely tied to international commerce, and as a country on the leading edge of the information age, “the Philippines is deeply interested in useful reforms that can spur the development of cross-border online commerce in the developed and developing world.”
Adopted by the General Assembly on 23 November 2005, the Convention seeks to enhance legal certainty and commercial predictability of electronic communications used in relation to international contracts. It addresses the determination of a party's location in an electronic environment; the time and place of dispatch and receipt of electronic communications; the use of automated message systems for contract formation; and the criteria to be used for establishing functional equivalence between electronic communications and paper documents -- including "original" paper documents -- as well as between electronic authentication methods and hand-written signatures. END.
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