If there’s one thing the 17th World Humanist Congress is going to be remembered for, it is an agenda that truly encompassed the globe.

At the beginning of the IHEU General Assembly delegates and other attendees were invited to introduce themselves. One of the most striking of those speaking was a man talking about the origins of IHEU, the work with others such as Harold Blackham, and the nexus of ideas and activity that took place in the 50s and 60s.

This award has been specially created by IHEU this year. We are giving a Lifetime Achievement Award to a very special man.

He first came to IHEU's 14th World Humanist Congress in 1999 in Mumbai. There, he took a keen interest in the work being done by Indian Humanists who were meeting the health care needs of people in urban slums.

Founded on July 4, 2005, at the World Congress of Free Thinkers and Atheists in Paris, in close cooperation with the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), the International Liaison Committee of Atheists and Freethinkers, meeting in Washington DC, USA, on June 4, 2008, at the initiative of American Atheists (USA), National Secular Society (Great Britain) and the Libre Pensée (France), submits the following proposals to all Atheist and Free Thinker organisations across the world.

This session resolves that the IHEU and its member organisations support the GEAR Campaign (Gender Equity Architecture Reform) and the recommendations of the United Nations High Level Panel on system wide coherence whose main points are:

Christopher Hitchens, author of the bestseller God is not Great, gave a thought-provoking keynote address on the final day of the IHEU World Humanist Congress. Videos of this address are now available.

International human rights concepts have evolved around two groupings of human rights as conceived by United Nations instruments.

In a session at the 2008 General Assembly on Human Rights, triggered by the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Roy Brown outlined just how ineffective the UNHRC was, indeed that it was at best passively shielding Human Rights abuses from examination and at worst an obstructing action against them. Roy gave examples to show that by some measures the Council had deteriorated to the level of its discredited predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights. Keith Porteous Wood was invited to suggest how IHEU member organisations and supporters should react.

It is an honor to address you today.

Those on the religious right wanting to interfere in HIV/AIDS prevention policy were understandably delighted with the election of George W Bush. It gave them the opportunity to ignore the evidence on HIV/AIDS prevention, and to replace science with pseudo-science, and facts with faith.