NEW YORK (TOP) - President José Ramos-Horta departs Timor-Leste today for a week long diplomatic sprint through New York and Washington, D.C., anchored by his address to the 81st Session of the UN General Assembly a stage the Nobel laureate has used for decades to press the case that small nations deserve a seat at the world's biggest tables.
The trip, running 19 to 25 September, folds together ceremony, advocacy, and hard diplomacy. It opens on Monday with Ramos-Horta conferring the Order of Timor-Leste on Professor Babafemi Badejo, the academic and former UN official who served as his chief of staff during his eighteen months as the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative in Guinea-Bissau a posting that made Ramos-Horta the only Timorese ever to hold Under-Secretary-General rank in the UN system. The same day brings a meeting with fellow Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai on girls' education, before an evening circuit of sea-level-rise diplomacy, a "Peace Cookbook" launch, and dinner with Bhutan's prime minister.
Tuesday puts Ramos-Horta on the Assembly floor for the session's formal opening under the theme "Restoring trust, managing transformation," with a bilateral against Czech President Petr Pavel and a high-level address on ending poverty. He'll also sit down with International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric to discuss humanitarian law ahead of a December conference in Geneva, before a US-hosted reception for assembled heads of state.
Wednesday is the marquee moment: Timor-Leste's national statement to the Assembly, followed by a panel on the UN's peacekeeping promise and back-to-back bilaterals with Portugal's Luís Montenegro and Solomon Islands' Matthew Cooper Wale a reminder of Dili's dual footing in the Lusophone world and the Pacific. An evening round table hosted by Indonesia's Foreign Policy Community rounds out the day, casting Timor-Leste's diplomacy explicitly in terms of "rethinking cooperation" between North and South.
The itinerary then breaks from ceremony: Thursday sends the President to Washington for security and defense talks with Senate Appropriations Chair Chris Coons and acting Peace Corps director Christopher Landau the trip's clearest thread of hard-interest diplomacy amid the week's multilateral pageantry.
Friday closes the loop with a bilateral with Secretary-General António Guterres, a meeting with Assistant Secretary Michel George, and an audience with the senior representative of Al-Azhar's Grand Imam before Ramos-Horta departs New York, due back in Dili on 27 September.
In a statement released alongside the itinerary, Ramos-Horta cast the week as an argument for "being a voice for small nations, for children, youth, women and girls" the same small-state framing that has defined much of his post-independence diplomacy, this time delivered from the UN's largest stage.
