Statements

As more and more issues increasingly demand global solutions ... we need to strengthen institutions for global decision-making and make them more responsible to the people they affect. This line of thought leads in the direction of a world community with its own directly elected legislature.

Peter Singer, Moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, 2002

We are struggling badly in the world, and we have not adopted a proper solution to our problems. In order to have a globally organized world, we also need global structures. We need a global parliament.

Lech Wałęsa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, co-founder of Solidarność and President of Poland 1990-95, 2004

Parliamentary oversight of the multilateral system at the global level should be progressively expanded. We propose the creation of a Parliamentary Group concerned with the coherence and consistency between global economic, social and environmental policies, which should develop an integrated oversight of major international organizations.

Tarjo Halonen, From the report of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization co-chaired by Tarjo Halonen, President of Finland (in the picture), and Benjamin Mkapa, President of Tanzania, 2004

A parliament at the United Nations would symbolize the notion of humanity as a community of world citizens.

Günter Grass, Nobel Laureate in Literature, 2006

We need to promote the democratization of globalization, before globalization destroys the foundations of national and international democracy. The establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the UN has become an indispensable step to achieve democratic control of globalization.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Former UN Secretary-General, 2007

The most obvious things are the hardest to do, for peoples and nations as well as for individuals. What is the present League of Nations? Nothing. We all long for a world parliament. We need a real League of Nations.

Gerhart Hauptmann, German dramatist and novelist (1862-1946), Nobel Prize laureate, in an interview, 1923

We need a new study for the purpose of creating a world assembly elected directly from the people of the world, as a whole, to whom the Governments who form the United Nations are responsible and who, in fact, make the world law which they, the people, will then accept and be morally bound and willing to carry out."

Ernest Bevin, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1945-1951), in a speech in the House of Commons, 1945

The only way out of international dictatorship is to place international law above governments, which means that there must be a parliament for making it, and that parliament must be constituted by means of worldwide elections in which all nations will take part.

Albert Camus, French author, philosopher, and Nobel Laureate, 1946

The method of representation at the UN should be considerably modified. The present method of selection by government appointment ... cannot give the peoples of the world the feeling of being fairly and proportionately represented. The moral authority of the UN would be considerably enhanced if the delegates were elected directly by the people.

Albert Einstein, Physicist, Nobel laureate and peace activist, in an open letter to the UN General Assembly, 1947

When the peoples of all the nations are capable of governing themselves through an International Parliament then and not till then, will war cease to burden man and universal peace become a thing accomplished.

William Sulzer, U.S. Congressman and Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1912